Category Centres

Can Digitisation of School Education be a Reality in India?

India is still not fully ready for the digitisation of education, especially school education, as has been the thrust of this year’s budget on education. Laying down bare statistics, Dr Protiva Kundu highlighted that 67% of schools in India have functional electricity and its connection ranges from about 25% in Manipur to 100 % in Delhi. Only 16% of schools have digital access and barely 1.2% of schools have digital libraries. About 40% of teachers have computer literacy. Dr Kundu was speaking at a panel discussion titled ‘Education and Union Budget, 2023-24’, organised by IMPRI Impact and Policy Research Institute, New Delhi on February 5, 2023 under #IMPRI Center for ICT for Development (CICTD).

Budget 2023: Maximum Government for Maximum Economy

By Indian standards post-liberalization, and especially by the standards of the Modi government’s pre-pandemic budgets, Budget 2023 is huge: 14.9% of GDP. The government proposes to use its Rs 45 lakh crore expenditure heft to not just boost growth but also to expand the presence of the state to sectors that had escaped its reach. Whether this is a good thing, or a bad thing will depend on the observer’s ideological predilections.

Budget 2023-24: Impact on Urban India & Local Governance

This year’s budget is a bag of misplaced government spending priorities and misses some crucial challenges facing urban development.

The last full Union budget of the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) government continues to be plagued with the idea that “the private capital will ameliorate some of the basic problems of India and that large capital-intensive technologies will usher in development, including inclusive development.”

How fallacious is this argument? We have seen this in the past three decades. The structural difference brought in by Manmohan Singh’s budget in 1991 was to “shift India’s economy away from the hands of the government to the hands of private enterprise, and embraced free trade.

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