FM proposes national digital library to promote ‘culture of reading’
The Hindu
₹4,000 crore set aside for PM SHRI schools
Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman proposed a national digital library for children and adolescents along with strengthening of the National Book Trust, for providing non-curricular titles in regional languages and English to physical libraries, in order to build a culture of reading, and to make up for pandemic-time learning losses.
“A National Digital Library for children and adolescents will be set up for facilitating the availability of quality books across geographies, languages, genres and levels, and device agnostic accessibility. States will be encouraged to set up physical libraries for them at panchayat and ward levels, and provide infrastructure for accessing the National Digital Library resources,” Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman said in her Budget speech.
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The Minister also spoke of collaborating with NGOs that work towards promoting literacy to achieve these objectives.
Financial sector regulators and organisations will be encouraged to provide age-appropriate reading material to the libraries, to inculcate financial literacy.
As far as budgetary allocation for the Ministry of Education is concerned, it has seen a total increase of 13% over the revised estimates of the last fiscal at ₹112,898 crore. School education has seen a hike of 16.5%, with a total of ₹68,804 crore set aside for it. The additional amount has been set aside for PM SHRI (Pradhan Mantri Schools for Rising India) school initiative announced recently, which has received ₹4,000 crore. The allocation for Samara Shiksha has gone up from ₹32,151 crore to ₹37,453 crore.
Higher education has received an increase in allocation of 7.9% as compared to the revised estimates of last fiscal with a total of ₹44,094 crore set aside for it.