PMC proposes Rs 67 cr cut in education board budget

The Pune Municipal Corporation (PMC) administration has proposed a cut of Rs 67 crore in the estimated budget for 2013-14 by bringing down the expenditure on salaries. This will bring down the budget to Rs 277 crore from Rs 344 crore tabled by the PMC education board.

"The budget proposed by the education board had earmarked 67 per cent for paying salaries of the education board staff and only 33 per cent was left out for educational purposes," said the administrators.

The number of posts approved by the state government were quiet less than the actual recruitment that took place. "The PMC plans to cut down the expenditure on salaries by reducing the staff strength," said a civic officer.

Earlier, the PMC education board had proposed a budget of Rs 344.24 crore for 2013-14, an increase of Rs 92 crore. There are as many as 1.03 lakh students in civic schools and the PMC education board is planning to take up programmes to encourage students to take admission in civic schools.

Board chairman Baba Dhumal said the number of students in English medium civic schools has gone up while the strength in Marathi and other language medium school has seen a dip.

Justifying the rise proposed in the budget, Dhumal said they were concerned about the dropouts and were taking multiple initiatives to improve the strength of students and the quality of education.

A special programme with the provision of Rs 20 lakh would be taken up to enroll all the children in the city. "Various teams would be set up to reach out to people living in slums or streets and convince them to send their children to school," he added.

The Board has also increased the expenditure on students' school uniform. "In 2013-14, we plan to spend Rs 13 crore on uniform of students as against Rs 8.5 crore in 2012-13. For the first time, the Board would provide uniform to nursery students along with raincoats, a physical education uniform and a pair of shoes," said Dhumal.

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