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Journalism of Courage
The Centre has allocated nearly Rs 1.13 lakh crore for education in the Union Budget 2023-24, raising the projected expenditure on school and higher education by around 8.3 per cent compared to funds earmarked in 2022-23, when the institutions of learning gradually came out of the shadow cast by the Covid-19 pandemic.
The Samagra Shiksha scheme, which is expected to be the major driver behind reversing learning losses, has registered a nominal hike of 0.18 per cent only, with allocation under it increasing from Rs 37,383 crore in 2022-23 to Rs 37,453 crore in 2023-24.
The outlay for PM Poshan has been increased by 13.3 per cent, taking the allocation to Rs 11,600 crore from Rs 10,233 crore. While no new major sector-specific scheme was announced, Union Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman said a National Digital Library will be set up for “children and adolescents” to provide a supply of good quality books at a time when students are trying to cope with the learning losses suffered during the pandemic.
“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,” Sitharaman said. Moreover, to “build a culture of reading, and to make up for pandemic-time learning loss”, the National Book Trust and the Children’s Book Trust will be encouraged to provide and replenish non-curricular titles in regional languages and English to these physical libraries, she added.
However, no funds have been allocated for the library project in the 2023-24 budget and the National Digital University project, which was announced in 2022, also saw no separate allocation. Incidentally, the Centre had in 2016 launched the National Digital Library (NDL) pilot project under which IIT Kharagpur runs an online repository of texts and video lectures on various subjects ranging from humanities to sciences.
Its focus, so far, has been on making available resources to help students prepare for entrance and competitive exams. While Sitharaman did not specify if the government plans to expand the scheme, her statement that the library shall be “for children and adolescents…for facilitating availability of quality books across geographies, languages, genres and levels, and device agnostic accessibility”, was an indication towards a shift.
In 2022-23, Rs 10 crore was earmarked for the project, which received Rs 20 crore in 2021-22, Rs 12.4 crore in 2020-21, Rs 10 crore in 2019-20, Rs 10 crore in 2018-19 and 2017-18 and Rs 5 crore in 2016-17. While total allocation for education was Rs 1.04 lakh crore in 2022-23, crossing the Rs 1 lakh crore mark for the first time, the revised estimate stands at Rs 99,881 crore.
