The Centre allocated about Rs 1.13 lakh crore for education in the Union Budget 2023-24, increasing the projected expenditure on school and higher education by about 8.3% compared to funds committed in 2022-23, when the institutes of learning gradually came out of the shadow cast by the Covid pandemic.

The Samagra Shiksha scheme has registered a minor hike of 0.18% only, with allocation under it rising from Rs 37,383 crore in 2022-2023 to Rs 37,453 crore in 2023-2024.

The expenditure for PM Poshan has risen by 13.3%, taking the budget to Rs 11,600 crore from Rs 10,233 crore. While no new significant sector-specific scheme was announced, Union Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman stated that a National Digital Library would be set up for “children and adolescents” to provide good quality books at a time when students are attempting to cope with the learning casualties suffered during the covid-19 pandemic.

States will be encouraged to place physical libraries for them at panchayat and ward levels and deliver infrastructure for accessing the National Digital Library resources,” Union Finnace Minister said. Moreover, to “create a culture of reading, and to cover covid-19 pandemic-time learning loss”, the National Book Trust and the Children’s Book Trust will be encouraged to offer and replenish non-curricular titles in regional languages and English to these physical libraries, Sitharaman added.

However, no funds have been given to the library project in the 2023-24 budget, and the National Digital University project, announced in 2022, also noticed no separate allocation. Incidentally, the Centre had in 2016 established the National Digital Library (NDL) pilot project under which the Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur conducts an online repository of texts and video lessons on diverse subjects ranging from humanities to sciences.

Its emphasis, so far, has been on making available resources to support students preparing for entrance and competitive exams. While Union Finance Minister did not determine if the government intends to boost the scheme, her statement that the library shall be “for children and adolescents…for enabling the availability of quality books across geographies, genres, levels, languages, and device agnostic accessibility”, was a move towards a change.

The previous year, Rs 10 crore was allocated for the project, which obtained Rs 20 crore in 2021-2022, Rs 12.4 crore in 2020-2021, Rs 10 crore in 2019-2020, Rs 10 crore in 2018-2019, and 2017-18 and Rs 5 crore in 2016-2017. While the complete allocation for education was Rs 1.04 lakh crore in 2022-23, striking the Rs 1 lakh crore mark for the first time, the modified estimate stands at Rs 99,881 crore.

The allocation for children in the Union Budget 2023 has decreased from 2.35% in 2022-23 to 2.30% of the total, according to a study by the Delhi-based HAQ Centre for Child Rights.

It also informs that the budget for National Child Labour Project resumes receiving reduced allocations. In Budget 2023, the project witnessed a further decline of 33%, the organisation said. The National Child Labour Project is a project by the Ministry of Labour & Employment to rehabilitate children forced into child labour. Other schemes also saw reduced allocations.

Child Protection is overlooked again in Union Budget 2023 with no shift in the allocation for Mission Vatsalya. The budget for Mission Vatsalya stands untouched at Rs 1,472 Crore, said HAQ Centre for Child Rights via its social media account. Mission Vatsalya is a central scheme to provide assistance to children in difficult circumstances.

The Delhi-based non-profit organisation also recorded that finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman mentioned the National Digital Library for children and adolescents in her allocation speech, but the majority of government schools do not own the facilities to access the digital library.

According to UDISE 2020-21, only 24.2% of government schools have internet facilities, and only 35.8% of government-aided schools have functional computers.

HAQ Centre for Child Rights also stated that the decline in scholarships and other education schemes for minorities would affect the education of children from these minority communities.

A massive drop of 69.61% for Pre-Matric Scholarship is there for Minorities amplifies problems of education of children belonging to unprivileged or minority communities.

The organisation said that the funding for education schemes for madarsas and minorities has dropped from Rs. 160 crores in 2022-2023 to Rs. 10 Crore in the 2023-2024 Budget.

Also, Pre & Post Matric Scholarships towards PM YASASVI for minorities go down by 27.14% in Union Budget 2023-2024 against the previous year's budget.

The Pradhan Mantri Innovative Learning Programme- DHURV allocation has declined to almost nothing.