A total expense of Rs 27,360 crore has been incurred under the PM SHRI scheme over the past three years, according to Minister of State for Education, Dr Subhas Sarkar.

This was a status update on the significant developments in line with the National Education Policy 2020 offered by Dr Subhas Sarkar in a written reply in the Lok Sabha on Monday.

He said that Rs 630 Crore was released as the first installment to selected 6,207 schools across the country, out of 14,500 PM SHRI Schools. The total cost of Rs 27,360 crore spread over a period of 5 years with central share of Rs. 18,128 crore was the monetary share.

PM SHRI is a scheme that aims to upgrade selected state and central government schools to create safe and stimulating learning environments for children.

“32 IKS centres have been set up to catalyze original research, education and dissemination of IKS; 64 high end interdisciplinary research like ancient metallurgy, ancient town planning and water resource management, ancient rasayanshastra etc. projects are undergoing. Around 3227 internships on IKS have been offered,” the response included.

Among the other highlights, Dr Sarkar said that Vidya-Pravesh–Guidelines, a three-month Play-based School Preparation Module, PM e-VIDYA to unify all efforts related to digital or online or on-air education: DIKSHA (Digital Infrastructure for Knowledge Sharing) as One Nation One Digital Platform having e-Books and e-Contents were readied.  

Alongside, NISHTHA (National Initiative for School Heads’ and Teachers’ Holistic Advancement) 1.0, 2.0 and 3.0 Integrated Teacher Training Programme for different stages of school education for Teachers, Head Teachers/Principals and other stakeholders in Educational Management also took shape over the past three years.  

Starting of the National Digital Education Architecture (NDEAR) for creating a unifying national digital infrastructure to energise and catalyse the education ecosystem, implementation of a scheme “New India Literacy Programme or ULLAS” targeting all nonliterates age 15 years and above, National Credit Framework (NCrF) and National Higher Education Qualification Framework (NHEQF), having an academic Bank of Credit to facilitate Transfer of Credits are some other proposals that materialized. 

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