Union Education Budget 2025 Live Updates: Union Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman will present the Budget for 2025-26 on February 1. Key areas of focus will include education, healthcare, and possible tax relief for the middle class. A day before the Budget, the government released the Economic Survey 2024-25 in Parliament. The survey highlighted that India’s school education system serves 24.8 crore students across 14.72 lakh schools, with 98 lakh teachers (UDISE+ 2023-24). Government schools make up 69% of the total, enrolling half of all students and employing 51% of teachers.
Private schools account for 22.5% of the total, enrolling 32.6% of students and employing 38% of teachers. The National Education Policy (NEP) 2020 aims to achieve 100% Gross Enrolment Ratio (GER) by 2030. Currently, GER is nearly universal at the primary level (93%), while efforts are being made to improve enrolment at the secondary (77.4%) and higher secondary (56.2%) levels.
For 2024-25, the government had allocated a record Rs 1.20 lakh crore to the education sector, a 6.84% increase from the previous year. Of this, Rs 73,008.10 crore was set aside for school education and Rs 47,619.77 crore for higher education. The budget for school education saw a modest increase of 6.11%, with Rs 4,200 crore allocated to the PM SHRI scheme. Meanwhile, higher education received a 7.4% rise in funding compared to the previous year.
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