Union-Budget 2025: Increased IIT and Medical Seats, Experts Say Move will Help Reduce Outflow of Students to Foreign Shores

Union-Budget 2025: The central government on Saturday announced a significant increase in student admissions at five Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) over the next five years and an additional 10,000 seats in medical colleges and hospitals next year. The government is set to enhance infrastructure to support the education of another 6,500 students across five third-generation IITs, (IIT Palakkad, IIT Dharwad, IIT Jammu, IIT Bhilai, and IIT Tirupati) which were established after 2014. .

Permanent campuses for these IITs have been set up in the last few years. These seats will be added in a phased manner over five years and will be mainly at the undergraduate or BTech level, Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan told reporters. The total number of students in the 23 IITs has increased from 65,000 to 1.35 lakh in the last ten years.

With the Bihar assembly elections this year, the expansion of hostels and other infrastructure at IIT Patna was also announced. In an interview with the Indian Express, Pradhan said that the larger and more enduring objective of IITs would be to go beyond functioning as mere academic institutions to also include teaching, research and innovation.

Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman also announced on Saturday that 10,000 medical undergraduate (UG) and postgraduate (PG) seats will be added next year.

She said this will be towards the target of increasing the number of medical seats to 75,000 in five years. The number of medical seats has expanded drastically over the past decade – the number of MBBS seats has increased from 51,384 before 2014 to 1,12,112 in 2024 and the number of Postgraduate seats has increased from 31,185 to 72,627.

The Union-Budget 2025 also provides for 10,000 fellowships over the next five years at IITs and Indian Institute of Science (IISc) under the PM Research Fellowship Scheme. The allocation for the scheme has been increased from Rs 350 crore in 2024-25 to Rs 600 crore this year. The scheme was first announced in the 2018-19 budget, when then finance minister Arun Jaitley said 1,000 students would be identified for fellowships to pursue PhD at IITs and IISc.

The total allocation for education this year is Rs 1.28 lakh crore, up from last year’s allocation of Rs 1.20 lakh crore. The higher education sector has seen a 5% increase in allocation compared to last year-from Rs 47,619 crore last year, it has increased to Rs 50,077 crore this year. It was Rs 73,008 crore last year which increased to Rs 78,572 crore this year.

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