The Indian government plans to increase higher education spending by 5 per cent in the upcoming financial year, with more money granted to the country’s prestigious Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs).
About 500 billion rupees (£4.67 billion) has been allocated to the Department of Higher Education for the upcoming financial year, up from 476 billion rupees in 2024-25. The department’s budget was later revised down last year to 465 billion rupees.
Within this, initiatives that will receive increased funding include financial aid, e-learning and support for central universities.
In a budget announced on 1 February, India’s finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman also announced that a new Centre of Artificial Intelligence for Education will be established, with 5 billion rupees allocated to the project. While few further details of the initiative have been shared, the new centre will join the three already announced in 2023, which focus on agriculture, health and sustainable cities.
Funding for IITs increased almost 10 per cent compared with last year’s budget, rising to 113 billion rupees from 103 billion rupees.
According to Sitharaman, the number of students educated at IITs has doubled over the past 10 years to 135,000. The minister said additional infrastructure would be created at the five IITs that opened after 2014 to educate an additional 6,500 students.
In contrast, the money spent on the country’s World Class Universities programme – also known as Institutions of Eminence – has fallen by 74 per cent from 18 billion rupees to 4.75 billion rupees in 2025-26.
The programme was first introduced in 2016 and aimed to support 20 institutions to become “world-class”, in an initiative akin to China’s Double First Class programme. Although it was set out that 20 universities would be granted the status of Institutions of Eminence, only 12 have been so far.
The government also committed to increasing medical places by 10,000 over the next year, with a goal of adding 75,000 over the next five years.
Medical education in India is notoriously oversubscribed, with many students forced to go abroad for their degrees – a trend prime minister Narendra Modi has previously pledged to reverse.
This is the first full-year budget since Modi’s BJP party lost its parliamentary majority in last year’s election. In general, it focused on tackling slowing growth and tax breaks for the middle class.
In a statement, Shri Dharmendra Pradhan, India’s education minister welcomed the new budget, saying it represents “another big leap towards empowering India's population with more opportunities for world-class education and building capacities of human capital”.
