The Union budget on Saturday announced increased funds for the IITs to create 6,500 more BTech seats over the next five years but slashed the allocations for several key institutions such as the Indian Institutes of Science Education and Research (IISERs) and IISc Bengaluru.
The allocation for education as a whole continued a two-year-old trend of a falling rate of increase.
The government has allocated ₹128,650 crore — ₹78,572 crore for school education and ₹50,078 crore for higher education — for the financial year 2025-26. The allocation was ₹120,628 in 2024-25, up from ₹112,900 crore in 2023-24 and ₹104,278 crore in 2022-23.
This means that the allocation for 2023-24 marked a rise of 8.26 per cent over the previous year, compared with increases of 6.84 per cent in 2024-25 and 6.65 per cent in 2025-26.
“The total number of students in the 23 IITs has increased 100 per cent from 65,000 to 1.35 lakh in the past 10 years. Additional infrastructure will be created in the five IITs started after 2014 to facilitate education for 6,500 more students,” Sitharaman said.
Currently, the 23 IITs offer 17,000 BTech seats per year. The five IITs set up after 2014 are in Bhilai, Palakkad, Goa, Tirupati and Jammu. The allocations to these premier tech institutes have risen 10.65 per cent, from ₹9632.5 crore in 2024-25 to ₹10,659 crore
in 2025-26.
However, the total allocation for the seven IISERs has dropped by 12 per cent, from ₹1,540 crore in 2024-25 to ₹1,353 crore for 2025-26. The allocation for the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) Bengaluru has fallen almost 2 per cent from ₹918 crore to ₹900 crore.
The Navodaya Vidyalaya Samiti, which runs over 650 residential schools for talented children, has seen its allocation slide 8.5 per cent from ₹5,800 crore to ₹5,305 crore.
Maya John, a member of the academic council of Delhi University, said the budget had disappointed the academic community, with the total outlay for higher education rising only marginally (5.1 per cent) over the 2024-25 allocation of ₹47,620 crore.
John said the actual expenditure tended to be lower than the budgeted amount, anyway.
“This marginal increment is absolutely insufficient when seen in the context of a drastic need for public-funded higher educational institutions for India’s aspirational academic community,” she said.
John added that the increase in grants to the central universities — to ₹16,691.31 crore from the 2024-25 revised estimate of ₹15997.62 crore — was insignificant (4.33 per cent).
Sitharaman announced the establishment up of to 50,000 Atal Tinkering Labs at government schools over the next five years. These labs will have equipment and kits to help children innovate and experiment, she said.
The finance minister said the government would implement a Bharatiya Bhasha Pustak Scheme to provide Indian-language books in digital form to schoolchildren and university students for a better understanding of their subjects.
She said ₹500 crore would be spent on the establishment of a Centre of Excellence in Artificial Intelligence for Education.
Sitharaman promised to enhance the cost norms under the Poshan 2.0 programme, under which nutritional support is provided to more than 8 crore children at the Anganwadi centres.
Disabled unhappy
The National Platform for the Rights of the Disabled on Saturday expressed disappointment with the budget. The NPRD condemned the marginal increase in the allocation to the department of empowerment of persons with disabilities.
“The allocation falls far short of what disability rights outfits have been demanding for long,” Muralidharan, NPRD general secretary, said.