By Anish Shah
On 1st February, 2024, Finance Minister,Nirmala Sitharaman presented an interim union budget for the Fiscal Year 2024-25. Before we delve further into the impact of the interim budget on the education sector, it would be pertinent to understand the challenges perceived by the government in the field of education. These challenges are pronounced in “The Indian Economy: A review”, a document authored by the Chief Economic Adviser to the government and released a few days before the interim budget. It mentions that over last 10 years, various initiatives and have been taken to revamp the entire education system that includes introduction of National Education Policy (NEP) 2020, New Curriculum Framework (NCF) for foundational stage, PARAKH scheme, PM-SHRI school scheme, Nipun Bharat Mission and expansion of digital learning. It also points to large-scale skilling done through various schemes like PM Kaushal Vikas Yojna and like.
At the same time, the document also admits that one of the biggest challenges confronting the Indian economy, even now, is ensuring the availability of a talented and appropriately skilled workforce to the industry, age-appropriate learning outcomes in schools at all levels and a healthy and fit population. It further concludes that there remains ample scope to mainstream skill development into education curriculum and upskilling a large chunk of the existing workforce into future-relevant skills. The government also envisions to make the education-skill continuum the greatest weapon in the Indian Miracle by reaching out to each of the partially educated youth (almost 50% of the employable age group) who only need to attend finishing schools for employability. This is an important admission of lacunae that needs to be addressed if India is to compete with the likes of China and other developed countries.
Hence, it is worthwhile to see if the budget lays out a clear action-oriented roadmap to develop a healthy, educated, and skilled population to augment the economically productive workforce. Historically, since the last 10 years, while the share of expenditure on education has increased in absolute terms, it has stagnated at around 2.9% of GDP. This despite the fact that NEP recommends a budgetary allocation of around 6% of the GDP to the education sector. If India is to become the world’s 3rd largest economy in the next three years and a developed economy by 2047, the education spend journey from 3% to 6% GDP has to happen now. While there has also been a lot of expectations being built up over the budget for the education sector which includes higher allocations, new policies for startups and edtechs, tax breaks and lower GST taxation, priority-sector lendings and like, one should be mindful of the fact that this is an interim budget and the government tends tol avoid any major commitments, initiatives and policy changes.
No doubt, the interim budget has tried to focus on some of the areas that are aligned to the above vision of the government. The finance minister noted that in the STEM courses, girls constitute 43% of enrollments, marking one of the highest figures globally. In this regard, the budget envisages establishment of a corpus of Rs. 1 lakh crore to encourage the private sector to scale up research and innovation in sunrise domains through long-term low interest loans and funding. This is likely to provide a boost to the education sector, especially the companies operating in STEM based courses, Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, AR/VR based learning and edtech startups. In keeping with its aim of having a healthy and educated workforce, FM announced setting up of more medical colleges by utilising existing hospital infrastructure. For this purpose, a committee is proposed to be setup.
Out of the total budget of Rs. 120,628 crores allocated to the education ministry, school education has been allocated a lion’s share of Rs. 73,008 crores which represents a Rs. 4,200 crore boost in the schooling outlay as compared to the previous year. There is also a significant allocation of Rs 6,000 crore to the PM SHRI program, marking a huge 50 per cent increase from the previous year. This is an important step towards NEP 2020 implementation as these schools will showcase the implementation of the NEP 2020 and emerge as exemplary schools over a period of time. Also, allocation of Rs. 20,554 crores for upgradation of Anganwadi centres under Saksham Anganwadi and Poshan 2.0 will help in expediting improved nutrition delivery, early childhood care and development. The budget outlay for PM STARS—The Strengthening Teaching-Learning and Results for States (STARS) —project has been increased from Rs 800 crore to Rs 1,250 crore. This will provide more focus on improving the assessment system in schools and ensuring equal education for all. Thus, despite being an interim budget, the government has done a balancing act by avoiding unnecessary freebies and at the same time focusing on the critical areas that need to be addressed through minimalist policy interventions and budget allocations and ensuring that education continues to remain one of the topmost priority of the policy making.
The author is the CFO of Zee Learn Limited.
