AGARTALA, August 28 (TIWN): Chief Minister Manik Sarkar today complained of hazy outlook of the new central government towards promoting education and said that the NDA government was apparently racing faster than its UPA predecessor in privatizing and disinvesting education sector. We are still unclear about their motives but their actions seem to pose threat to the nation’s academic milieu, Sarkar said.Speaking at the inaugural programme of a two day national seminar on perspectives of education and theological standpoints organized by ICFAI University, Tripura, Chief Minister Sarkar that the state government contributed its part in promoting education from elementary to higher level.“We are now trying to increase our footprints in higher education but then we are having our financial constraints”, the Chief Minister said.

“We are currently contributing nearly 22 percent of our state budget in the education sector and we feel it is increasingly becoming insufficient”, Sarkar said. He added that the state rose from 20 percent literacy rate in 1947 to 95.16 percent in 2012 with 10 thousand Anganwadi Centers operational across the state and 98 percent of the state’s children enrolled in primary education.

He alleged that the central government has been historically found to deny its liabilities in promoting education citing it to be contained in the concurrent list of the Constitution. “This is a criminal neglect to the nation’s liability in developing the human resource index in true form”, he said.

Sarkar today heavily criticized the role of different central governments in westernizing or saffronizing education and said that academic discourses were meant for moral, social and overall educational upliftment of individuals.

The central budget doesn’t have more than 2.5 percent allocated for education sector, the Chief Minister said adding that the left parties had been demanding higher budgetary allocation in education and health sector since the first Left Front government was formed in 1978.