new delhi there will be no guarantee that the money you will be made to pay as 2 cess on top of all the other taxes will actually end up being spent on education and midday meals finance minister p chidambaram who has defended the cess envisaged in the upa common minimum programme saying it is for the noble cause of educating our children and grand children would however not be seen to be sinning on his part he would do the good turn of providing an additional grant matching the estimated proceeds from the cess to the department of elementary educationit will be a earmarked cess officials insist meaning the money collected will be allocated to the department as extra budget that however will not ensure that the money would actually be utilised money loses colour once it goes into the consolidated fund in the ultimate analysis the money from the cess would only go to bridge the centres revenue gap in spending on things such as salary subsidies and interest payments fiscal experts saidnext page 7525 resource sharing bw centre and states by not putting the education cess into a separate public account as is the case for the cess on diesel which goes into the central road fund the government would disappoint even those who have lent support to the idea of a cess ficci president m k modi recently told the finance minister that industry sees no justification for a separate tax for education as it is one of the basic functions of the state for which taxes are paid in any case cii on the other hand while welcoming the cess had demanded that the money from the cess be put into a separate public account 6to ensure that it is spent on providing basic educationwhile the centre has a statutory obligation to share the proceeds from all central taxes with the states it gets to keep the entire money from a cess the cess on diesel mopped up rs 5761 crore last fiscal it went into the dedicated and nonlapsable central road fund for building highways railways and rural roads but for a variety of other cess collected by the centre there was no direct relation with the purpose for which they were leviedgiven the logistics involved with the allindia implementation of the national programme of nutritional support to primary education and sarva shiksha abhiyan and the 75 25 resource sharing between the centre and the states for the ssa fiscal experts have little doubt that the extra allocation would lapse