India Needs To Invest More In Education Amid Economic Growth: Sanjay Kumar, Edu Secretary, GoI

The New Education Policy (NEP) 2020 envisages that we should be spending at least 6 per cent of our gross domestic production (GDP) on education, said Sanjay Kumar, Secretary, School Education and Literacy, Ministry of Education, Government of India.

While speaking at the fifth FICCI ARISE School Education Conference 2022, he said NEP is looking up to the foundation of literacy and numeracy.

He also said, "Currently, we are spending only 4.6 per cent of our GDP on education. It is imperative that while the economy is growing, we need to invest more in education.”

The secretary also stated that there are around 260 million students from classes 1 to 12 in the country who are attending 1.48 million schools of which 1.05 million are government schools.

According to him, there are around 9.6 million teachers who are part of these schools, and hence it is crucial to address their training and infrastructure requirements. 

Kumar also focused on the dynamic feature of the education system.

He added, "We are moving away from the book-based education system and technology is playing a key role in it. Also, liberal arts need to regain their ground and the industry, and academia must work towards it. Let us reimagine our system before we reboot."

The secretary also raised the ongoing debate on education versus coaching and said that there is a need to develop a conversation and that must be built until it acquires critical marks in the society in our public life.