The customary Halwa ceremony may not happen with the government’s decision to do away with the print copies of the Union Budget 2021. The budget presentation may go paperless without the Halwa but the contents of the budget are expected to taste sweet as we prepare ourselves to recover from the bitterness of the Covid pandemic.
As an academic, I have my own share of the sweet recipe (syllabus) for the Union Budget 2021 with a hope that the serving on February 1, 2021, will be a sumptuous fill and not a ‘symptomatic pill.’The Keynesian influence on the budget will make the Government the biggest spender to trigger demand and restore stability. Though the Fiscal Responsibility and Budget Management Act (FRBM) is armed with restrictions on government spend to ensure deficit levels are under control, extraordinary times like these require an immediate review of the FRBM.
There is no doubt that the Finance Ministry is filling its expenditure cylinders for the much-needed oxygenation despite the FRBM strangulation. With expected focus on social sector and infrastructure spending, the trickle-down effect on steel and cement industry growth should necessitate a special pricing vehicle to support construction activities in education and healthcare. This shall have huge benefits to this social sector which shall be facing heavy crowding out of capital due to higher levels of sovereign borrowing either making cost of capital unaffordable and pushing up unit cost of social service, or depriving critical social care to those when it is needed the most.
A special pricing cap may possibly not be a budget decision item but corporates with special prices for social sector spending may be incentivised through budgetary exemptions or waivers. In one of my previous articles ahead of the Union Budget a few years back, I had compared the plight of the teaching fraternity with that of Oliver asking for more. It is the same Oliverian teacher in me standing at the door steps of the North Block that asks for more with a plan to give back more in return. There is no doubt that the school and higher education ecosystem responded well during the Covidian crisis.
The education administrators, teachers and students adjusted rapidly to make one of the world’s largest educational systems open its learning gates though the campus gates were closed. Despite the best efforts taken, this pandemic also exposed the porous contours of the phygital teaching-learning infrastructure that needs to be filled with policy plugs. While the Ministry of Education is charting its own policy plans through it New Education Policy, the Union Budget may provide the necessary financial plug.
The Centre or State or both under the spirit of cooperative federalism should provide sovereign guarantee and create a special higher education foreign currency denominated loan corpus of at least Rs 1,000 crore to be disbursed to progressive and deserving private higher educational institutions (HEIs). Private HEIs should use these soft loans for ramping up their phygital ecosystem with a road map for repayment without default. This loan corpus is similar to the Higher Education Financing Agency (HEFA) for public institutions.
If the creation of corpus with sovereign guarantee is a tall ask, the categorisation of higher education as priority sector lending by the RBI may provide some relief and quicker access to capital. While the preceding interventions will provide an institutional support, the need for individual support is also becoming essential. Majority of the teachers in the school and higher education ecosystem are the salaried class. As much as the government has been providing online and digital infrastructure support through various schemes and projects, individuals also need to get hooked to this technology backbone.
The contribution of education cess to the government’s exchequer by the salaried class is by no means a small number. Not to be viewed as a return gift but as a policy accelerator, teachers require personal income tax waiver or exemption for purchase of digital assets that can prepare themselves better for the phygital future. As a responsible academic, I stop here with my Union Budget wish list though it’s long. I am sure there are enough ingredients to make this halwa-less budget a sweet recipe for teachers like me.
S Vaidhyasubramaniam vaidhya@sastra.edu
Vice-Chancellor, SASTRA Deemed University