One of the significant initiatives in the previous year’s Budget was nearly 22 per cent increase in the Budget outlay for higher education. This reflected the view that emphasis on higher education is important to increase the opportunities for gaining knowledge and for higher level skill development among expanding numbers of pass-outs from school education. One would expect that this year’s Budget too would increase the outlay in higher education to enable creation of educational infrastructure suited to the needs of the industry, R&D and other sectors for educated and technology-savvy talent.
The higher education Budget in the last few years placed greater emphasis on establishing new IIMs. The country has 19 IIMs at present which aim at providing balanced distribution of these premium institutes among various States. However, it is hoped that this year’s Budget doesn’t announce yet another set of IIMs to be opened. While the IIM brand is indeed valuable, opening a plethora of new IIMs without adequate campus and educational facilities, quality faculty and social infrastructure around the new campuses may not alone yield significant results.
One should expect that the Budget 2016 will also allow greater leeway to the private sector to expand its capacity to provide quality higher and management education to the needy segments of the society.
Technology has become a boon to delivery of higher education in the recent years with the opening of technology based learning platforms. This is becoming an increasingly effective mode to enhance access to quality management education and is an area where encouragement through taxation reliefs to students can be helpful. Equally important would be to continue providing tax relief on educational loans (both principal amount and interest) to the students and their parents, thereby making higher education more affordable.
(The writer is Dr Surendra Batra, Dean IMT Ghaziabad)