The education market in India is growing at a very fast pace. It is estimated that its net worth will be Rs5.9 trillion by next year. This means that there will be a shift in how learning will change — from e-learning to virtual classrooms to new training and teaching tools and therefore, transforming the entire system, says ADIT GUPTA
According to a report by India Ratings and Research Pvt ltd, the education market in India will be worth Rs5.9 trillion in 2014-15 as against Rs3.33 trillion in the 2011-12 fiscal year. The education sector received an allocation of Rs68,728 crore for 2014-15, up from a revised budget estimate of Rs61,857 crore in 2013-14. The Modi Government recently announced the establishing of five more Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) in Jammu and Kashmir, Chhattisgarh, Goa, Andhra Pradesh and Kerala and five Indian Institutes of Management (IIMs) in Himachal Pradesh, Punjab, Bihar, Odisha and Maharashtra, with an allocation of Rs500 crore. The Government has realised that India needs a large number of centres of higher learning which are of world class standards and can boast of industry best-practices.
Once the initiative is complete, India will have a total of 18 IIMs and 21 IITs. The previous Government had set up seven new IIMs and eight new IITs between 2008 and 2011, but most of these are operating from makeshift campuses and face challenges in terms of their quality of teaching and research. Technology as it does to everything it touches, has brought about paradigm shifts in the way education and learning is imparted and consumed. Starting with simple distance learning and e-learning solutions and then growing into learning facilitated by social media and interactive virtual classrooms, technology has come a long way in transforming the education ecosystem.
The generation of Web 2.0 is steadily changing the landscape of the education sector and over the past decade, we have witnessed several significant ramifications and implications of this change. In sync with this ever evolving trend, the Government voiced its plan to set up virtual classrooms and online courses for school education with an allocation of Rs100 crore for this initiative. Indeed the education industry ecosystem in India is witnessing a sea change nowadays, in both in its nature and its scope. As part of its Vision 2020 plan, the Government is also looking to increase the number of school going children to 30 per cent by 2020.
In terms of investments in schools, the sector got 9.9 per cent more than the revised budget estimate of 2013-14. Of the total higher education budget, technical education, which comprises, among others, the IITs and the IIMs, got the lion’s share of Rs7,138.97 crore.
Moreover, the Government also proposed to set up a Jai Prakash Narayan National Centre for Excellence in Humanities in Madhya Pradesh and five new All India Institutes of Medical Sciences and a Sports University. This is part of the total school education allocations.
It also advocated starting a school assessment programme and aimed to infuse new training tools and motivate teachers through another scheme called the Pandit Madan Mohan Malviya New Teachers training programme. The burgeoning scarcity of well-trained teachers is considered a hurdle in improving schools and education. The biggest challenge undoubtedly is that of infrastructure. Setting up a school is a cumbersome process necessitating very high costs in terms of building materials, municipality permits, electricity, remuneration for teachers, and maintenance. As a corollary, this acts as a hurdle to many bright students who cannot afford that kind of money.
Inspite of the best of intentions, the Budget had categorically failed to provide fiscal incentives to attract private sector investment in education. That will have given education a status of an infrastructure sector, thus enabling it to access inexpensive domestic and foreign funds.
On the other side of the fence, local administrative bodies and NGOs are displaying well-crafted efforts to ensure that education reaches the masses. Newbie entrepreneurs are launching unique educational concepts and generating quality funding to expand their ventures. Investors are not shying away from putting in good amount of money as they find the education domain quite lucrative and more or less risk resistant in the long run.
(The writer is founder & CEO, Function Space)