DUTA Press Release;1 Feb 2018

                                                                                                                         
The Budget Speech of the Finance Minister reinforces scheme of replacing grants by loans and Graded Autonomy. It ignores huge infrastructural deficit and increased student-intake  accompanied by lack of teachers. It announces RISE (Revitalising Infrastructure and Systems in Education by 2022) to be funded through HEFA. That means that  infrastructural needs of the institutions of higher learning will have to be met through loans, which, in turn, requires educational institutions to commercialise their activities toward revenue generation in order to raise revenue to repay loans. This will shift the burden of sustaining public funded higher education on parents and students, increasing their expenditure towards education. The Budget speech pushes further the scheme of  ‘Institutions of Eminence’ wherein 10 public and 10 private institutions will be identified as world class institutions.

The NITI Aayog Three Years action agenda is being put in place. What NITI Aayog does explicitly, the budget speech does implicity: it assumes that adequacy of inputs is irrelevant for quality and that what matters is outcome measurement and outcome based rewards and penalty. By providing infrastructural inputs through loans through HEFA, it seeks to ensure that the outcome being measured is commercial success. Access to quality higher education will be crippled and standards as well as content of education will take a hit. Determination of quality and content of higher education by the market will undermine the character of higher education, independent thinking and democracy.

There is all round decline in allocation to higher education (UGC specifically, also for IITs, IIMs, NITs, etc.) accompanied by huge allocation of 2750 crores (last budget 250 crore) to HEFA and 250 crores to Institutes of Eminence. There is only a marginal increase in the fund allocation of Rashtriya Uchatar Shikcha Abhiyan (RUSA), which funds higher education in the states’ sector.

Contrary to the claims made in the Budget speech, the budget allocation to higher education reflects lack of commitment to public funded education in the country and disregard for the aspirations of the youth. It will entail continuing neglect of the pitiable state of most of education institutions save those which are commercially viable.