A move towards education for all

Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman presented the Union Budget for 2023. A National Digital Library for children and adolescents will be established to make them accessible on any device. Additionally, the government of India will pay a renewed emphasis on health, education, and skilling, said Nirmala Sitharaman. Also, financial sector regulators and organisations will be encouraged to provide age-appropriate reading materials to these libraries in order to introduce financial literacy.

The final full budget before the general elections in 2024 makes this year's budget very important. The government has implemented a number of new initiatives and policy changes. Significant announcements about these developments are made in this year's Union Budget. In order to make it easier to find high-quality books in a variety of languages, genres, levels, and locations, as well as to make them accessible on any device, a National Digital Library for children and adolescents will be established. States will be encouraged to set up physical libraries for them at the panchayat and ward levels, as well as to provide the infrastructure necessary to access the resources in the National Digital Library.

Additionally, the National Book Trust, Children's Book Trust, and other sources will be encouraged to provide and replenish non-curricular titles in regional languages and English to these physical libraries in order to establish a reading culture and make up for the pandemic-time learning loss. Collaboration with NGOs that work in literacy will also be a part of this initiative.

The announcement of the national digital library is a wonderful initiative that factors in the new demands of our times. Nowadays most new learning is done online in fact it would be fair to say that the digital medium is the single most important point of access for students. Hence access to academic and other books digitally is more than welcome. This Budget further enables the new National Education Policy by creating more industry and academia partnering opportunities. It also focuses on teaching pedagogy by training teachers with the tools of the future.

(The author is Director, School of Media & Communication & The Idea Lab, MIT-World Peace University, Pune)