It looks like the Prime Minister (who's also the Chairman of the Planning Commission, according to the Constitution of India) Manmohan Singh is planning a very ambitious Five-Year Plan! More details are awaited, of course, as to how much funds could be alloted, how the funding requirement is met, how this affects the pay scales and fees of educational institutions, what is being done towards non-technical/medical education, etc. are not yet known.
So, what will this focus on education bring to the country as a part of the 11th Five-Year Plan 2007-2012)?
- 19 % allocation to education (as opposed to 7.7 % in the 10th Five-Year Plan).
- 30 Central Universities
- 7 IIMs (Indian Institues of Management)
- 8 IITs (Indian Institutes of Technology)
- 20 IIITs (Indian Institutes of Information Technology)
- 5 IISERs (Indian Institutes of Science, Education, and Research)
- 1600 ITIs (Industrial Technical Institutes)
- 10,000 Vocational schools
- 50,000 ICT-based Skill Development Centers
The 10th Five-Year Plan ended in March 2007, and the Prime Minister has apparently revealed all this information in his message for India's 60th Independence Day in the year 2007 (http://pmindia.nic.in/speech/content.asp?id=570) but this time, he spoke on the eve of 95th National Science Congress.
Source: A news story in Telugu daily newspaper Eenadu, dated January 04, 2008:
India had been independent for 60 years, but the country never had an opportunity to focus any of its Five-Year Plans on Education, since there were other issues that were more important at every juncture. Thus, we should welcome this emphasis on education warmly. However, it's disappointing that all these numbers only talk about engineering, science, and technology but nothing is spoken about education in the field of medicine or in other fields such as law or liberal arts or other fields of the academia. Let's hope the final plans have something towards this end too.
