Budget 2023: FM announces National Digital Library for children, youth and AI centres in top educational institutions

Presenting the Union Budget 2023 on Wednesday, Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman said that a National Digital Library will be established for children and youth for facilitating quality books across multiple subjects.  

Sitharaman further said that for realising the vision of "Make AI in India" and "Make AI work for India", three centres of excellence for artificial intelligence (AI) will be set up in top educational institutions.
“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,” Sitharaman said, adding that this will help children and adolescents overcome learning losses due to the Covid-19 pandemic.  

She added that “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.” 

The National Book Trust (NBT), the Children’s Book Trust (CBT), and other sources will be encouraged to replenish titles in regional languages in these libraries, said the FM.  

National Digital Library of India (NDLI) is a virtual repository of learning resources which is not just a repository with search/browse facilities but provides a host of services for the learner community. It is sponsored and mentored by Ministry of Education, Government of India, through its National Mission on Education through Information and Communication Technology (NMEICT). 

The government also announced the setting up of a national digital university in the last Budget to solve the problem of limited access to seats within the higher education ecosystem. The university is likely to start operations in June-July this year.  

The university will offer exclusively online courses from its partner institutes, which could be both private and public universities and will function under a hub-and-spoke model, which means that one product is delivered to various stakeholders from a central location.