Budget 2023: Educators seek tax incentives, focus on technical upskilling, footprint outside India

Union Budget 2023-24 will likely pave way for the legalisation of the permanent account number (PAN) as a single business identification

Educationists have said the government should offer tax incentives and enhanced subsidies to private and public educational enterprises to enhance their contribution to knowledge and research.

“It can serve as a twin-engine powering transformation of knowledge worldwide. Private educational institutions should also be considered to share the burden and discharge public good on the state’s behalf,” said Rohit Sood, a spokesperson for Lovely Professional University in Jalandhar.

Educational services and products are currently in the 18 percent goods and services tax slab.

Since 1968, the education sector has highlighted the need for increasing its budget to 6 percent of GDP, Sood said.

“Scholarships, technical training, and enhanced infrastructural facilities for providing a conducive environment for research can only be attained through public-private partnerships in the education sector,” he said.

The government’s expenditure on education constituted 4.5 percent of India’s GDP in 2020, according to World Bank data.

Foreign campuses

Education experts want the upcoming budget to facilitate the presence of Indian educational institutes overseas.

“The establishment of foreign campuses of prestigious Indian educational institutions and the execution of an application-based curriculum will encourage students to use what they have learned to solve problems,” said M Kishore Babu, dean at KL Deemed to be University in Vijayawada.

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Institutes with overseas footprints include Manipal Academy of Higher Education, Birla Institute of Technology & Science, and Amity University.

In February last year, the government formed a 16-member committee of directors of seven Indian Institutes of Technology and vice-chancellors of four central universities to prepare a roadmap for allowing Indian universities to set up overseas campuses.

Technical upskilling

Kishore Babu said more investments in education will facilitate technical upskilling.

“The learner will experience a discernible transition in 2023 away from subject-based learning strategies and toward more skill-based ones,” Kishore Babu said. “Education experts shall emphasise the need for developing students' managerial, analytical and problem-solving skills.”

The World Economic Forum estimated that 85 million jobs may be displaced by a shift in the division of labour between humans and machines by 2025, while 97 million new roles may emerge that are more adapted to the new division of labour between humans, machines and algorithms.

Echoing the foundational principles of the National Education Policy 2020 – access, equity, quality, affordability, and accountability, experts urged the government to encourage the setting up of a digital library ecosystem that can work in conjunction with planned digital universities.

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“Such digital content repositories will not just aid learners but also support institutions and educators with classroom learning, given the ease of access to curated and authentic content,” said Tarun Arora, founder of Knimbus, a digital library platform.

Focus on apprenticeship

When it comes to tech talent, India has a supply gap of 21.1 percent – the lowest among the top tech locations such as the US, China, and the UK, according to a Nasscom-Zinnov 2022 report.

Experts pointed out that India has faced a skills crisis for quite some time and over the past five years, apprenticeship has emerged as a solution to this challenge.

Last year, India reached a milestone of 580,000 apprentices, but to make the next milestone of 1 million apprentices a reality, it needs interventions to augment the skilling ecosystem.

Sumit Kumar, chief business officer at TeamLease Degree Apprenticeship, asked the government to create provisions to scale up degree apprenticeship adoption by the industry and for academia to run apprenticeship-embedded degree programmes.

“Academia needs more autonomy to create programmes in all streams, along with sector skills councils. Degree apprenticeships symbolise quality apprenticeships, which lead to vertical and horizontal mobility of apprentices,” he said.

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Kumar said degree apprenticeships will also drive the gross enrolment ratio alongside the youth's employability and livelihood.

The National Education Policy of 2020 has targeted a gross enrolment ratio of 50 percent in higher education including vocational education by 2035, almost double the ratio of 26.3 percent in 2018.

The gross enrolment ratio in higher education was recorded at 27.1 percent in FY20, according to the Economic Survey 2021-22.

The government has taken multiple initiatives aimed at revolutionising the higher education ecosystem by enabling higher vocationalisation, greater multi-disciplinary research, providing multiple entry and exit points, promoting globalisation of education, and leveraging the potential of Information and Communication Technology in teaching and learning, the survey said.