There is an underlying theme in the current budget as it has been in the earlier year’s budgets. Make India a knowledge and technology-based economy, in the next 20/25 years. There is a subtle shift to being a ‘Vishwaguru’ or a ‘teacher’ to the world. We have revered a teacher since the vedic times, and will continue to revere for all times to come. “Akhanda mandalaa kaaram vyaptam yena chara-charam, tat-padam darshitam yena tasmii shree gurave namaha”. Translated, it means “Salute the great guru, who made us realise that the ‘Guru’ and ‘God’ reside in the whole universe, in living and in dead”.
This is an extremely well-articulated position the country has taken in recent times. However, like all positions, this too needs investments of financial and intellectual capital. In that context, numbers betray trust. The budget appears only incremental in nature, what with the allocation for education in the last seven years dropping to 9.5% of the total expenditure from 10.4%,
We live in a technology driven world today. The cyber boundaries are truly obliterated, though physical ones exist for propagating hegemony. Emphasis on AI, with three technical excellence centres, 100 Labs for 5G Services, National Digital Library for Children, are right steps in the journey to Digital Transformation. That said, a balance must also be struck between what technology dictates in the first part and what ‘Vishwagurutwa’ dictates in the second.
Budget laying a great emphasis on digitisation, exploration in Artificial Intelligence and upskilling answers the first part. ‘Make in India’ requires setting up of Max Planck and Fraunhofer like Institutes. Agriculture, defence, Infra, telecom, energy all have massive stakes in that initiative.
The launching of Pradhan Mantri Kaushal Vikas Yojana 4.0 is aimed at making lakhs of skilled youth in the next three years for Industry 4.0. AI, robotics, mechatronics, IOT, 3D printing, drones, and other soft skills are all important. Focus on Agri startups and precision farming can create new job opportunities.
A technology centre for incorporating teaching learning pedagogies such as ‘Shravan Vidhi’, ‘Manan Vidhi’, ‘Nididhyasa Vidhi’, ‘Prashnottar Vidhi’, ‘Tark Vidhi’ ‘Vyakhya Vidhi’, ‘Adhyaropa Apavad Vidhi’, ‘Drishtant Vidhi’, ‘Katha-Kathan Vidhi’, which all help students understand difficult subject matter through illustrations and stories, as was done in ‘Vedic’ times is missing that would have helped the second part. These in conjunction with emerging technologies such as metaverse, AR, and VR would have aided our ‘world leader’ pitch. The absence however, might hypothecate our ‘vishwaguru’ pitch to ChatGPT like Chatbots.
NEP, a document that has laudable intent of ‘vishwagurutwa’, seeks a spend of 6% of GDP on education. But last year spend was 2.9% and has always been around 3%. Higher education spend is around 1.3/4 % and technical education spend, even lesser. With 6/7% inflation, what would be the real value of allocation? Certainly, other line departments do contribute to education through their budgets. But that is for institutions they maintain. True, 20 IITs, 26 IIT’s, IISc all got a mention. Though public universities in the State domain account for 90% of student enrolment, they have no mention. Our HEIs/Universities have very limited corpus compared to the universities abroad. We must allow them to generate funds in innovative ways.
Money Control, India’s prominent Financial and Business portal reveals that 23,000 Indian millionaires have left India since 2014 and that nearly 7,000 millionaires left in 2019 alone, costing the country billions in tax revenue. Since 2015, nearly 9 lakh Indians have given up their citizenship. With a large percentage of nurses and doctors going abroad and 1.8 million Indians expected to spend close to $85 billion on studying abroad by the end of this year, our ‘world leader’ pitch may need new heroes and new investors.
Establishing new research and teaching institutions, with smart class rooms and intelligent transport systems are necessary. But construction of new schools and converting all primary to secondary schools should be prioritised over smart classrooms.
‘Vishwagurutwa’ journey seeks intuitive methodologies that self-correct inconsistencies within systems. All education in whatever form must translate into new job opportunities. Whereas available markets are getting saturated, new technologies such as AI and ML are shrinking the base of the employment pyramid. These are times when our age-old wisdom and resiliency must come to the fore in transiting the barriers to ‘Vishwagurutwa’.