Union Budget 2023-24: National Digital Library For Children & Teens On Cards To Make Up For Pandemic Years

In her Budget speech, Union Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman announced that a National Digital Library will be set up for children and adolescents.

“A National Digital Library for children and adolescents will be set up for facilitating [the] availability of quality books across geographies, languages, genres and levels and device-agnostic accessibility. States will be encouraged to set up physical libraries for them at panchayat and ward levels and provide infrastructure for accessing the national digital library resources,” Sitharaman said.

Sitharaman also announced that the National Book Trust, Children’s Book Trust and other sources will be encouraged to provide and replenish non-curricular titles in regional languages and English to make up for the lost learning during the peak pandemic years.

The aforementioned publishers will be directed to provide such books to the digital library and the physical libraries that would be established, Sitharaman added. The finance minister said the government will collaborate with NGOs working in literacy for this initiative.

The Union Budget 2023-24, which is Sitharaman’s fifth budget in a row, saw her announce the participation of financial regulators to provide age-appropriate materials to improve financial literacy among the populace. These materials would also be supplied to the National Digital Library and the associated physical libraries across the country.

“To inculcate financial literacy, financial sector regulators and organisations will be encouraged to provide age-appropriate materials to these libraries,” the minister said.

The move to set up a National Digital Library comes as the government has increased its push to digitise education in a bid to increase access for children and teens across the country. For instance, the PM e-Vidya scheme, launched in 2020, aims to unify all efforts related to digital/online/on-air education to enable multi-mode access to education. This will benefit nearly 25 crore school-going children across the country.

At the same time, Digital Infrastructure for Knowledge Sharing (DIKSHA) is a portal and a mobile app for students to select courses according to their language and region and get access to NCERT books and study materials for free.

Similarly, the National Digital Education Architecture (NDEAR) was launched as a UPI-like architecture for education in 2020. The platform defines a set of principles, standards and specifications, guidelines and policies to strengthen the digital infrastructure for education.

Both DIKSHA and NDEAR are part of the homegrown tech stack, India Stack. In a recent interaction with the media, Minister of State for Electronics and IT Rajeev Chandrasekhar noted that along with UPI and DigiLocker, several countries had expressed their interest in DIKSHA and NDEAR.

The government is set to sign agreements with seven countries for India Stack, Chandrasekhar said earlier this month.