As for the school education sector, the government believes that some of the initiatives of the previous government: the Mid-day Meal facility and the Right to Education schemes, focused only on enrollments of children to schools. The new Government believes that there should be a focus on quality and learning outcomes, instead. Therefore, there has been a major reduction in allocation for both these schemes and there seems to be an increased focus of the government on the infrastructure up gradation of 80,000 govt. schools, which seems to be a step in the right direction.
In higher education, the govt. has promised easy loans for the youth and also set up many institutes such as IITs, IIMs, AIMS and other professional & job oriented institutes across the country. This shows an increased focus on employability of the youth. These are good initiatives, though the challenge for the govt. will now be maintaining the standard of these new institutes so that the brand name of IITs and IIMs is not diluted.
However, I believe the education sector should have had got service tax redemption, but that did not happen. Instead, the service tax and education-cess has gone up to 14% from 12.36%, which is not good. Because of this, an additional burden of the increased service tax will be levied on the general people.
want to know about franchisee criteria