Education Budget: Fellowships for Engineers, Training for Teachers

The government will set up 24 new medical colleges across the country.

We don’t need no education, said no Finance Minister ever.  

(Photo: The Quint)

We don’t need no education, said no Finance Minister ever.

An outlay of Rs 85,010 crore for the education budget for the next fiscal was announced by Union Finance Minister Arun Jaitley during his Union Budget 2018 speech at Parliament on Thursday, 1 February.

While Rs 35,010 crore have been allocated for higher education, an amount of Rs 50,000 crore has been earmarked for school education.

We have managed to get children to school but quality of education is still a concern. Education will be treated holistically without segmentation from nursery to class 12.

Arun Jaitley, Finance Minister

The Finance Minister announced that the government would launch 'Revitalising Infrastructure and Systems in Education' by 2022.

By 2022, every block with more than 50 percent ST population and at least 20,000 tribal community members will have ‘Ekalavya’ school on par with Navodaya Vidayalas.

Arun Jaitley

Jaitley proposed setting up two new full-fledged schools of planning and architecture, as well as 18 schools of planning and architecture, under the Indian Institutes of Technology (IIT) and National Institutes of Technology (NIT). These will be autonomous schools.

As many as 1,000 engineers will be offered handsome stipends and the Prime Minister Research Fellowship so that they could be incentivised to do PhDs at IITs and IISc.

The government would set up 24 new medical colleges across the country.

The government has announced that by 2022, every block with more than 50 percent ST population will have Eklavya schools on par with Navodaya Vidyalayas.

The Finance Minister also said that we need to move from the blackboard to the digital board and that the government focuses on digital education as part of its Digital India initiative.

But, how will all this help if there aren’t enough trained teachers?

To overcome this problem, the government also announced a new programme – Diksha – in which 13 lakh untrained teachers would receive formal training.

Total allocation on education, health and social security has gone up from Rs 1.22 lakh crore to Rs 1.38 lakh crore. In the opening lines of his Budget speech, the Finance Minister said that the government has managed to get children to school but quality of education still remains a concern.