Budget 2023: Education funding increased to Rs. 1.13 lakh crore, an 8.3% increase from 2022.

Know more about Education Budget 2023

The Samagra Shiksha project has only seen a minor increase of 0.18 percent, with funding going from Rs 37,383 crore in 2022–2023 to Rs 37,453 crore in 2023–24. This program is supposed to be the main catalyst for reversing learning losses.

The allocation for PM Poshan has grown by 13.3%, moving from Rs 10,233 crore to Rs 11,600 crore. Nirmala Sitharaman, the Union Finance Minister, said a National Digital Library will be established for “children and adolescents” to give a supply of high-quality books at a time when pupils are attempting to cope with the learning losses experienced during the pandemic, despite the fact that no new significant sector-specific initiative was announced.

States would be urged to create physical libraries for these people at the ward and panchayat levels and to provide the necessary infrastructure for them to access the National Digital Library’s resources, according to Sitharaman. Additionally, the National Book Trust and the Children’s Book are working to “create a culture of reading and to make up for pandemic-time learning loss.”

But neither money nor a separate allocation for the National Digital University initiative, which was announced in 2022, was made in the budget for 2023–24. IIT Kharagpur operates an online repository of texts and video lectures on a variety of subjects, spanning from humanities to sciences, under the National Digital Library (NDL) pilot project, which was started by the Center in 2016.

Its primary focus so far has been on providing students with tools to aid in their preparation for entrance and competitive tests. Sitharaman did not say whether the government intended to broaden the program, but her remark that the library would be “for children and adolescents…for facilitating availability of excellent books across geographies, languages, genres and levels, and device agnostic accessibility” suggested a change.

The project received Rs 10 crore in 2022–23, 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, Rs 10 crore in 2017–18, and Rs 5 crore in 2016–17. The revised projection now stands at Rs 99,881 crore, while the overall allocation for education was Rs 1.04 lakh crore in 2022–23, exceeding the Rs 1 lakh crore mark for the first time.