Union Budget 2022-23: Students Betrayed

The Central Executive Committee of the Students Federation of India releases the following statement regarding the Union Budget 2022-23.

The Budget announcement for FY 2022-23 comes at a time when India’s economic distress still lurks around the corner, with slowered growth and low prospects of increased purchasing power for the large section of Indian masses. Needless to say, the economy has still not reached the pre pandemic levels of national income in real terms.

At this outset, for the last two years, the education sector was marred with three specific forms of crises. First, throughout the Covid-19 pandemic and subsequent lockdowns, the educational institutes remained closed and mostly adhered to a ‘digital mode’ of teaching and learning. Even as late as August 2021, a survey conducted under “School Children’s Online and Offline Learning (SCHOOL).”,conducted by eminent social scientists in 15 states have shown an unimaginably high incidence of ‘digital divide’. Only 8 percent of rural students and 24 percent of urban students were studying online regularly. Which means more than three fourths of school students were out of the ambit of any online learning opportunities in India, for the past two years. This digital divide is a by-product of (Link:https://ruralindiaonline.org/…/locked-out-emergency…/ ) caste, class and other resource inequalities, where the poorest sections among the students missed out on learning or even continuing education. Second, with the physical distancing measures in place and schools being locked down, the drop out rates and non-enrolment rose significantly. A corollary to this phenomenon was that a large section of students had to either join the workforce as casual daily workers to help the families with livelihood loss or even worse, for female students, who had to get married without consent even before legal age. Third, and this is perhaps the least discussed impact of the pandemic in terms of the education sector in India. During the first phases of Covid surge, the central government issued the National Educational Policy 2020 as a directional framework, which introduced both centralisation and privatisation as the pillars of education during the NDA regime. The policy pursuit was clear, that education would now become more of a commodity than a right of a citizen, and therefore the pandemic and lockdown helped the ruling dispensation to pursue ‘mixed/ blended mode of education’ which suggests that there will be a ‘subscriber fee’ to enter the education sector, and in each step there will be a need to pay more in order to access education. The blended mode (through TV/ online classes) pedagogy remained exclusive and in the last two years the worst sufferers were the students hailing from marginalised sections.

At this juncture, after two years of lockdown and almost defunct offline education system, one would expect that the budget allocations would reflect and resolve some of the crises. But it starts exactly what NEP proposes: Only a meagre 3 percent of the total allocation goes to the ministry of school education and to the ministry of higher education, summing 103 thousand crores in this budget of 2022. This share of education (and health) sector in the central expenditure is criminally low, given that the budget speech itself recognises that there has been learning loss among students especially from public institutes.

We would now explain the proposed budgetary allocations from the highlights of the budget to investigate if the aforementioned three faceted crisis of education is dealt at all in the budget.

Addressing Digital Divide by 200 TV Channels: Jumla One

The definition of Digital divide is not just having a smart-phone or a TV at home. Although even by that definition almost two third of the Indian households failed to have access to online classes. However, the concern of digital divide is loss of learning because of the shift towards online mode of classrooms. There are of course resource inequalities, where we observed one third of the households had no access to online means of participation (ASER 2021). However, for most of the marginalised families with daily wage earning parents, the students depend on the classroom as the only means of learning. For first generation learners especially, the classroom learning can be done if interactions are allowed. In the 200 TV channels that the Finance minister has announced, the advertisements of the bearded supremo of India can fare well, but learning without interaction or without any supervision is a mere unrealistic vision of disbursal of knowledge. To add insult to the injury, the current Budget upholds the NEP version of blended mode again, with over emphasising the online modes. This has larger implications, throughout the pandemic, we have observed that there has been a booming market space for private learning portals who cashed in on the distress of lost learning due to lack of classes. In this budget, the centre has now shifted the burden of learning towards the students to become ‘Atma Nirbhar’ while new teaching professionals with larger school infrastructure to accommodate students back to the classroom remains a distant dream. The ‘One Class- One TV Channel’ provokes one to add the phrase ‘no-one learning’ as the budgetary expenditure in the NEP environment remains stagnant to promote private bodies in elementary education.

E-Vidya / E Learning/ Digital Teaching in Higher Education: Jumla Two

In one of the keynote, the FM ensured, “High-quality e-content in all spoken languages will be developed for delivery via internet, mobile phones, TV and radio through Digital Teachers.” A reiterating fact is that the telecom and internet facilities are still run by the private service providers, one cannot override the exorbitant charges that comes along with those services. Therefore, the subscriber fee still goes on unchecked, while the whole university space is now being thought of as a ‘hub’ of digital content creation. In Higher education, the budget promises, a “Digital University” which provides access to students across the country for world-class quality universal education with personalised learning experience at their doorsteps. The very nomenclature of personalised and delivery at doorsteps again reminds us that the advent of digital learning would eventually open up towards privatisation along with centralisation of the whole higher education system. Access to such resources remain questionable, as it does not cater to most of the marginalised students. The budget statement remains a testament to the fact that it is introduced to play a supporting role to the previous NEP document. This particular budget doesn’t offer much to address the required resources in terms of expenditure expansion on education, however it operates as an ideological document, where private digital enterprises are provided the space to grab the ‘public good’.

As heinous as the current budget remains, particularly towards social sector spending, the larger critique should be, that in real terms, a stagnant expenditure means, seat cuts and fund reduction in research for Higher educational institutes. A larger resistance should be made to clear the clutter around this digital obsession, while the majority of students are waging their everyday struggles to get back to the classrooms.

Released by
V P Sanu (President)
Mayukh Biswas (General Secretary)