JOIN USGovt proposes to set up National Police University, National Forensic Science University
Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman on Saturday proposed to establish a National Police University, a National Forensic Science University and a host of other new initiatives for education and skill development of students.
She announced a budgetary allocation of Rs 99,300 crore for the education sector and Rs 3,000 crores for skill development in 2020-21.
But the Human Resource Development (HRD) ministry saw just 4.69% increase in its overall budgetary allocations for 2020-21 over that of the last fiscal.
The finance minister, while presenting the Union Budget in Parliament, earmarked a total of Rs 99,311.52 crore budget for both higher education and school education departments of the HRD ministry.
Overall budgetary allocation for the ministry was Rs 94,853.64 crore in the last fiscal.
“Students in the general stream vis-à-vis services or technology stream need their employability improved. About 150 higher educational institutions will start apprenticeship embedded degree/diploma courses by March 2021,” Nirmala announced.
She also proposed to start a programme whereby urban local bodies across the country would provide internship opportunities to fresh engineers for a period of up to one year.
“In order to provide quality education to students of deprived section of the society as well as those who do not have access to higher education, it is proposed to start degree level full-fledged online education programme,” the finance minister said in her Budget speech.
This will be offered only by the institutions, who are ranked within the top 100 under the National Institutional Ranking Framework (NIRF).
“Initially, only a few such institutions would be asked to offer such programmes,” she added.
The finance minister also proposed to attach one medical college to each of the existing district hospitals in public-private partnership (PPP) mode to produce qualified doctors to meet the shortage of general practitioners and specialists that the country is facing
“Those states that fully allow the facilities of the hospital to the medical college and wish to provide land at a concession would be able to receive viability gap funding. Details of the scheme would be worked out,” she said.
The government will encourage large hospitals with sufficient capacity to offer resident doctors diploma and fellow of national board (DNB and FNB) courses under the National Board of Examination (NBE) which imparts postgraduate medical qualifications.
“There exists a huge demand for teachers, nurses, para-medical staff and caregivers abroad. However, their skill sets, many a time, do not match the employer’s standards and therefore need to be improved, she noted and proposed that special bridge courses will be designed by the ministries of health, skill development together with professional bodies to bring in equivalence," she said.
To increase the enrollment of foreign students in Indian higher education institutions under ‘Study in India’ programme, the finance minister proposed to roll out Ind-SAT, an entrance test for such students, in Asian and African countries.
“It will be used for benchmarking foreign candidates who receive scholarships for studying in Indian higher education centres,” she said.
Noting that education system required greater inflow of finance to attract talented teachers, innovate and build better laboratories, she said that steps would be taken to enable sourcing external commercial borrowings and the FDI “so as to able to deliver higher quality education.”