A day before the FM Nirmala Sitharaman presents the Union Budget 2023, academicians and educators are batting for revamping skilling ecosystem, doubling fund allocation for education sector and improving vocational education.
Chocko Valliappa, Vice Chairman, Sona Group of Education Institutions’ suggests the finance minister to present a roadmap for doubling allocation for education over the next three years by cutting down/re-aligning a host of grants, subsidies and other financial SOPs. “Reports suggest that India has just crossed China in terms of total population and is now the most populous nation. To reap the demographic dividend, education and skilling are of utmost importance, and I hope the allocations for both in the Union budget are doubled to create India as the Knowledge epicenter of the world.”
Requesting the government to recognize and encourage upskilling, Madhushree Sekher, Dean, School of Vocational Education, Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS), Mumbai said: “Vocational Education is an important area, which requires decisive effort from the government. The whole concept of vocational education will be relevant only when secondary-level education in the vocational space is linked to higher education.”
“We would like government to recognize and encourage a continuum of vocational education from the school level to higher educational institutes through the 3 year BVoc (undergraduate program) and postgraduate programme relating to the National Skills Qualifications Framework (NSQF) skill- level 4.5, 5.5, 6.7 and 7. This will enhance the employability,” Sekher said.
Speaking about the Budget 2023, IC3 Institute, Executive Director, Neha Bahl said: “Budgetary allocation for adult education and teacher training was Rs 127 crores in 2022–2023 as against Rs 250 crores in 2021–2022. To effectively execute the objectives of NEP 2020, we anticipate that teacher training will receive a higher budget this year. In addition, a special fund may be established to enhance human resource capacity and efficiencies in the education sector. This would include bringing technological advancements and raising the standards of teaching and delivery in both public and private institutions in India.”
Gaurav Bhatia, CEO of RISE, commented, “India currently has a low GER i.e., Gross Enrollment Ratio in higher education, where only about 27.1% of all eligible candidates can make it to a higher education university. With a national ambition to ensure this number goes up to 50% by 2035, there needs to be higher spending on higher education. In today’s world, an important aspect to understand is that traditional brick-and-mortar institutions can not cater to this high burgeoning demand. Higher education in the hindsight only gets 40% of the allocated budget every year as the majority of it goes to school education.
“The second area where I believe the budget allocations should increase is research as from over 237 crores in 2021, it went down to 218 crores in 2022-23. In order for our universities to be ranked globally, we need to have higher spending on higher education and improve such outcomes and innovation in the universities. Hence, instead of diminishing our budget allocations, India needs to increase them in order to start seeing better outcomes as a country in the quality of education and in the quality of students who graduate from our universities,” Bhatia added.
Vineet Nayar, Founder, and Chairman, Sampark Foundation expects a 30% increase in the number of teachers at primary school level. The NGO founder said, “The cascading effects of covid can be seen in significant drop in learning levels but an increase in enrolment in government schools. Unless we substantially increase allocation to education in the upcoming budget we will see this negative trend continue. Education builds the future of our country and we need a 30% increase in the number of teachers and their capabilities to teach in the right way. If we miss this opportunity we would have millions of children who will miss benefiting from the focus on foundational numeracy and literacy skills and next year will be too late.”
The challenge of balancing the budget is huge and Nayar hopes the government will set the right priorities for the future of the children of this country. Today not only the allocation to education is much lower than what it needs to be, a substantial part of that budget goes into teachers doing non-teaching activities. Thus, what actually reaches the classroom is much lower than what is allocated in the budget.
“I hope we will not just have a substantial increase in education budget this year to fulfil the FLN mission but also draw a red line on using teaching time for non-academic activities, investing in frugal ideas instead of expensive technology solutions that are easy to buy but difficult to use and investment in increasing number of teachers at the cost of everything else because technology is not a replacement of teachers,” he further said.
In the forthcoming budget, we hope to see lot more focus on providing relevant infrastructure to support learning and learning recovery, particularly in low-resource schools, Ratna Viswanathan, CEO, Reach to Teach said: “The budget should focus on achieving the target set by NEP 2020 of universal achievement of Early Childhood Education and FLN skills by 2025.”
There should be budget outlays for building/co-locating Bal Vatikas in Government Schools, and recruiting and training anganwadi workers for Early Childhood Education needs, Ms Viswanathan added.
Allocations are required for physical infrastructure and supporting software to create live digital dashboards at the state education department level and provide resources for the integration of the school student’s database with the Civil Registration System (CRS) and e-Mamta Database to ensure accurate identification of all eligible children for enrolment through a unique ID for each child, to improve enrolment, attendance and transition, she added.
Noting that several organizations, corporate and government departments, are collaborating to support and provide technical education to students in both rural and urban areas of India, KA Alagarsamy, Director, Consortium for Technical Education (CTE), Karnataka said, “The upcoming union budget 2023 is expected to boost funding for Skill Development and Technical Education, particularly for semi-employed youth, in order to support these efforts.”
The collaborations with the government and increasing budget allocation in the skill and technical education sector, Alagasamy added: “These efforts aim to provide world-class skills to the market through institutions such as ITIs, Polytechnics, and Engineering Colleges, as well as by supporting employment opportunities for young people in the growing industrial sector of the state.”
Ashish Munjal, Co-Founder and CEO of Sunstone expects this year’s budget to focus on providing students with monetary relief as well as best-in-class advanced educational infrastructure and amenities.
Munjal further added: “Forums such as NETF (National Educational Technology Forum) might continue to be the government’s focus areas to aid technologically enhanced learning strategies. While increased investment in areas of AI learning and other developing technologies is anticipated, students, particularly in tier 2 and tier 3 cities and government schools, must have uninterrupted access to digital resources. States are developing smart classrooms at a fast pace, and it is anticipated that there will be a significant push in this direction as well.”
Saying that the government advanced the wave of digital education with the announcements of the opening of the digital university and expanding the ambit of the PM e-vidya programme to compensate for the learning losses of students in the previous budget, Divya Jain, Director, The Class of One expects budget 2023-24 to bring more reforms to expedite the digital learning revolution to help create a parallel education mechanism and give many students quality-based learning.
“The education sector is growing on a massive scale, and funds should be allocated commensurate with its market size and growth dynamics. On the other side, there are many people who subscribe to the ideology that a degree acquired from a virtual school is worthless. The government should emphasise the positive impact of digital education. The Budget should incentive the digital education sector and introduce measures so that the general public can outgrow this misperception,” she added.
Ashish Rajpal, Founder of XSEED Education said, “Our three wishes for the budget would be – Implementation, Implementation, Implementation. Prioritization and allocation of resources towards implementation of the National Education Policy is critical. It’s been widely agreed that it’s a great document in principle, however, the country and children will only benefit when it is implemented on the ground. If XSEED was to pinpoint one main reason for its fantastic results – +31% same-student improvement in one year – it would be implementation.”
Divya Jain, Co-founder at Seekho said, “Ed tech has seen course correction over this past year but has emerged stronger. Specially in higher education and employability it is the only solution and way forward. We look forward to a lower tax slab for education services to students in particular. Push to implement nep which will allow for the youth to learn digitally, work and still earn their degrees.”
Poshak Agrawal, Co-founder, Athena Education said, “The government should allocate at least 6% of the GDP to education. The spendings should be made on quality education, improved pedagogy, and experiential curriculum.”
Silpi Sahoo, Chairperson, SAI International Education Group expects impetus on the EdTech space, increase in budget allocation, reduction in GST, stronger connections between economic opportunity and education system, collaboration with foreign universities, focus on child education, and attention to mental well-being schemes.
“We hope that the budget will have all the required financial and regulatory measures to improve the GER in higher education from a measly 27.4% to upwards of 40% over the next 10 years. One way to accomplish this is by ensuring more students should get access to degrees in their regional languages, which is a much-needed step introduced by the NEP and we hope that the government will further enhance this initiative’s implementation,” said Ruchir Arora, CEO and co-founder, CollegeDekho.
