Reshma Ravishanker
February 1. The Union finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman presented the Union Budget 2023-24 to Parliament in New Delhi. The government has announced a budgetary allocation of Rs.1.12 lakh crore for education (school education and literacy and higher education). This is an increase by Rs 8,622 crore as compared to the previous year.
This year’s total budget allocation for education at Rs 1,12,899 crore is an increase from the previous Union budget 2022-23’s Rs 1,04,278 crore. In the Union Budget 2023-24, Rs.44,094 crore has been allocated for higher education, Rs.68,804 crore for the department of school education and literacy.
This year’s budget focus is on upskilling youth for better employability, ensuring education outreach for tribal students, new age technology research and development, and teacher training.
Budget highlights:
- Teacher training will be re-envisioned through innovative pedagogy, curriculum, continuous professional development and ICT implementation. DIET to be developed as centres for excellence
- 38,800 teachers and some support staff to be recruited to serve at Eklavya Model Residential Schools to serve 3.5 lakh tribal students
- 3 centres for excellence to be set up at educational institutions to boost use of Artificial intelligence to support agriculture among other sectors
- Youth will be trained in industry 4.0 courses
- In the PM Kaushal Vikaas Yojana 4.0, which will be in partnership with the industry, courses will be aligned with industry needs. New age skills such as coding, robotics, mechatronics, 3D printing, drones technology will be focussed on to ensure new age skilling. 30 skill India International centres will be set up across the country.
- 100 labs to be set up for 5G apps development.
- National Book trust, others will be encouraged to ensure availability of non curricular titles in regional languages to be make up for pandemic induced learning loss.
- Digitization of 1 lakh ancient scriptures initiated.
- 157 new nursing colleges to be established.
- A National Digital Library for children and adolescents for ensuring availability of quality books across geographies, languages, genres and levels, and device agnostic accessibility.
- States will be encouraged to set up physical libraries for them at panchayat and ward levels and provide infrastructure for accessing the National Digital Library resources.
Also read: Union Budget 2023: What the education sector wants