Does India spend more on promoting Sanskrit than protecting environment?

Does India spend more on promoting the Sanskrit language across the country than protecting our environment? The answer is yes.

A simple calculation of the Budget allocation for the past three years show that the government of India spent Rs 608 crore for the protection of the environment, its management and sustainability. The government spent Rs 116 crore on protecting the environment in 2019-20, Rs 225 crore in 2018-19 and Rs 267 crore in 2017-18, as per the Union Budgets for the respective years.

On the other hand, the government spent a whopping Rs 643.84 crore on the promotion of Sanskrit in the last three years.

On Feb. 3, in response to an unstarred question by three Shiv Sena MPs and two BJP MPs, the Union Ministry of Culture released these figures on how much the Centre spent on promoting Sanskrit.

Among the allocation for classical languages, Sankrit received 22 times the total amount of Rs 29 crore spent on the other five classical Indian languages – Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Malayalam and Odia.