The Budget 2017-18 is forward looking and innovative for the higher education sector, in India. Accreditation of universities and colleges will ensure autonomy and competitiveness in the education sector. However, this would require higher education institutions to scale up their academic infrastructure, which can be accelerated through partnering with global universities and adopting global practices. This will help them improve their rankings in India as well as globally.
Also, the initiative towards establishing 100 India international skills centres across the country to impart advanced training and foreign language classes will help India leverage its demographic dividend at a global scale. This will benefit the youngsters seeking overseas opportunities in a big way. The new umbrella, with respect to the National Testing Agency, is a path breaking step as it will subsume all competitive exams conducted in the country.
— Ravneet Pawha, Associate Vice-president (Global Engagement), Deakin University, Australia.
The Budget has given major attention to skill and vocational training. We support the government’s call to acknowledge the importance of skill learning and the allocation of Rs 2,200 crore towards skill strengthening. The need of the hour is to focus on youth and provide them with opportunities that will help them grow their skills and in turn contribute back to the development of the country. Imparting education through digital is the future of education and we strongly believe that this will build the efficacy in the education system; making it more learner-centric.
— Aditya Malik, CEO & MD, Talentedge
The Finance Minister has rightly shifted his focus on the youth as we stand as the nation with the largest youth population in the world with 356 million youth. Overall, the Budget 2017-18 is very promising with a strong grasp on the nation’s growth for tomorrow with its streamlined focus on the youth and is in line with the Government’s vision at making India an education hub.
— Shekar Sanyal, Director and Country Head, the IET
In his the Budget Speech 2017, it was heartening to hear the Finance Minister, Arun Jaitley lay emphasis on energising the youth of the country. This is indeed important and has to be done by creating an environment conducive to innovation and scientific thought process. The Finance Minister also offered to set up an Innovation Fund for secondary education for ensuring universal access, gender parity and quality improvement. This is a welcome move and hopefully it will include ICT enabled learning. In higher education, Arun Jaitely proposed to provide autonomy to institutes of higher education to further add impetus to growth in the private sector. More autonomy is always welcome. The Ministry also proposed the setting up of a National Testing Agency for all Entrance Exams. But the National Testing Agency should not only manage large scale tests, but should also have a research wing for research on testing like ETS in USA.
— Prof Dheeraj Sanghi, Dean of Academics, IIIT-Delhi
The biggest problem in education today remains the assessments, because unless we change the assessment format, teaching and learning in schools cannot improve. So, I’m really glad that the Government has freed CBSE from other forms of assessments, because it was turning into a national assessment body which was overburdening it. CBSE should focus on researching better assessment & examination formats through which a child can be holistically evaluated. And once we have a more holistic format for assessments, I’m sure teaching and learning in schools will change. This initiative will ensure that the resources are used to create better evaluation methods to help them focus more on the holistic development of our children.
— Amol Arora, Vice-chairman & Managing Director,
Shemrock & Shemford Group of Schools
The Budget for 2017–18 looks promising for the education sector. I see the process of standardising curriculum, which has been the need of the education sector for very long, finally turning into a reality. The proposal to launch National Testing Agency to conduct all major entrance examinations is a milestone. As Finance Minister pointed out, CBSE would now be relieved from the burden of conducting exams and can henceforth focus on academics better. Besides that, this step would also free students from the burden of taking different entrance examinations. last year, the hurried implementation of Eligibility cum Entrance Test (NEET) had left students confused over whether to follow the CBSE syllabus or not. This move would dispel all such confusions over syllabus in future.
— Beas Dev Ralhan, CEO & Co-founder,
Next Education India Pvt ltd