Given the perennial competition to get into the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) and the Indian Institute of Management (IIM), the Finance Minister’s promise to set up five new IITs and an equal number of IIMs was widely welcomed.
The only catch is that the eight IITs set up in the Eleventh Plan Period continue to function out of temporary premises and the IIT system as a whole faces a faculty shortage of 35 to 38 per cent.
The five new IITs proposed in this year’s Budget will be set up in Jammu & Kashmir, Chhattisgarh, Goa, Andhra Pradesh and Kerala. The five States identified for setting up the new IIMs are Himachal Pradesh, Punjab, Bihar, Odisha and Maharashtra. A sum of Rs. 450 crore has been set aside from the total allocation of Rs. 27,656 crore given to the Higher Education Department in the Union Human Resource Development Ministry for setting up the new IITs and IIMs.
The current cost of setting up one IIT is close to Rs. 1,800 crore over five years and the government is already staring at a bill of Rs. 15,565 crore, which is the revised cost estimate for constructing the eight new IITs set up in the Eleventh Plan. In fact, the Planning Commission had taken the position that no new IITs and IIMs should be set up in the 12th Plan Period as this phase should be used for consolidating the expansion that took place in higher education during the 11th Plan.
On the whole, the allocation for education has gone up only marginally: From Rs. 50,136.30 crore in the last fiscal to Rs. 55,115.10 crore in the Department of School Education and Literacy, and from Rs. 24,485 crore to Rs. 27,656 crore in Higher Education.
In Elementary Education, the priority will be to plug the gaps in ensuring minimal school infrastructure facilities with particular focus on providing toilets and drinking water in all the girls’ schools in the first phase. Teacher training gets a new scheme christened after Pandit Madan Mohan Malviya with an allocation of Rs. 500 crore and school curriculum will have a separate chapter on gender mainstreaming to sensitise people towards the concerns of the girl child and women.
While the ongoing Madrasa Modernisation Programme of the government has got an additional Rs. 100 crore, the BJP’s manifesto promise of augmenting the traditional artisanship of minorities has found its way into the budget through a programme for the upgradation of the skills and training in ancestral arts for development of the minorities.
