The Future of Education: Budget Allocated, What’s Next?

The two years that have gone by, at the backdrop of the Covid-19 pandemic, necessitated the entire higher and technical education ecosystem to strengthen their digital infrastructure.

These considerations were reflected in the recent Budget to accentuate the learning experience and reduce the gap created by offline schooling.

This year’s Economic Survey also highlighted that the pandemic has had a significant impact on the Indian education system and there has been a decline in the enrolment of rural children in the age group of 6-14 years in schools.

In a bid to cover the learning losses and minimize the adverse impact of the pandemic both state and central governments are announcing a slew of measures to improve the framework in the entire education landscape of the country, ranging from primary education to higher education.

PM e-VIDYA programme:

In a big step towards providing high-quality e-content in all spoken languages, the central government announced that the ‘one class-one TV channel’ programme of PM eVIDYA will be expanded from 12 to 200 TV channels. This will be done to provide supplementary education to children in Classes 1 to 12. Students will be able to access it via the Internet, mobile phones, TV and radio through digital teachers. As a result, this measure not just boosts the digital infrastructure of the education industry but also makes education accessible for every student, beyond the lingual and geographical boundaries.

Focus on higher education:

When it comes to higher education, there is a welcome announcement of a digital university by the government. This will be established to provide access to students, across the country, world-class quality universal education with personalized learning experience at their doorsteps.

In fact, the central digital university with a hub-and-spoke arrangement will serve the need for remote learning in the digital space.

Besides, the expected world-class foreign universities and institutions in the Gujarat International Finance Tec-City (GIFT City) will induce specialized learning by offering courses in various subjects like Financial Management, FinTech, Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics.

Additionally, to encourage natural, zero-budget and organic farming, and modern-day agriculture, the government is promoting interdisciplinary education while parallelly providing a structured syllabi to improve urban planning in India.

Making India Employable:

With the demand for technology services going up during the pandemic, skilling turned into one of the key focus areas for the government. Some of the government's measures are directly linked to employability.

To make it happen, the Finance Minister in her Budget speech announced the launch of Digital Ecosystem for Skilling and Livelihood—the DESH-Stack eportal with the aim to empower citizens to skill, reskill or upskill through online training to make the youth employment-ready.

The e-portal will also provide API-based trusted skill credentials, payment and discovery layers to find relevant jobs and entrepreneurial opportunities. If implemented effectively, this can help emerging job seekers become more job-ready.

With that the central government also announced plans to set-up 750 virtual labs in Science and Mathematics, and 75 skilling e-labs for simulated learning environments in 2022-23.

Financial support at the regional level:

Under the ambit of educational facilities provided by the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC), 1383 teachers have been engaged to impart free education to 48209 students in 243 secondary schools. A total of 81 teachers are engaged in the services of the 730 specially abled students in 17 BMC special schools, the body revealed.

With the government’s constant efforts at revising policies that aim to focus on the holistic development of the emerging workforce- students, the future looks promising for the Indian youth.

Overall, the allocation to the education sector increased more than 11% to Rs 1,04,277.72 crore, against a 6% cut year-on-year in the previous fiscal to Rs 93,223 crore. Out of this Rs 63,449.37 crore is promised school education, while the Department of Higher Education has been allocated Rs 40,810.34 crore.

These latest announcements by the government aim to bridge the gap between businesses struggling to find job-ready talent and job-seekers grappling to find a job where their skills match the demand.

As Malcom X said, “Education is our passport to the future, for tomorrow belongs to the people who prepare for it today.”