"Unless educated children come into mainstream..." Kapil Sibal on Union Budget

New Delhi [India], February 11 : Speaking in the Rajya Sabha on the Union Budget, MP Kapil Sibal on Tuesday emphasised that "unless the children get quality education, 'till then Bharat will never be Viksit".
Sibal also criticised the Union Budget and said, "...This government has had already ten years and the delivery mechanism has been both slow and inconsistent. But we were hoping that after the eighth budget of the Union Finance Minister (Nirmala Sitharaman), we will get some vision as to what the government intends to do. First you have to identify the challenges. Then we can decide what will we have to do."
"The biggest challenge probably facing our country is that we have to educate our children. Unless the educated children come into the mainstream and get quality education, till then Bharat will never be Viksit. Viskit Bharat means an Educated Bharat...But they (government) have increased the Education Budget by seven per cent," he said.
Union Minister for Education Dharmendra Pradhan had informed that the total budget allocation for the Ministry of Education has reached Rs 128,650 crore, marking a 6.22 per cent increase over BE 2024-25.
"..We need to have a plan as how to make our children educated...Today we have not even attained the goal of Universal Education forget about the quality education. So if you donot have quality education, how can you develop the skills of the children," Sibal asked the government in the Rajay Sabha.
He also highlighted the challenges of Artificial challenges and sought to know from the government the position of country in the technological revolution.
"Today, the skills we need in the 21th centruy were not there in the 20th century. Today, ChatGPT, DeepSeek is a new technological revolution that is taking place in the world..Where are we standing in these? What plans do we have for the future.We expected the Finance Minister to telll us? What do we intend to do to deal with these challenges. We cannot afford to apply AI to our systems, because if we do, we will loose the jobs, that we already have,"he said.
Notably, the budget session of parliament commenced on January 31 and, according to schedule, will end on April 4.