India, Feb. 2 -- Finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman, while presenting the Union Budget 2025-26 on Saturday, announced that the government will add 6,500 more seats at Indian Institutes of Technology (IIT) and 10,000 more medical seats next year to accommodate more students.

Sitharaman said the government will add engineering seats at IITs that started functioning after 2014 and expand hostel and infrastructural capacity of IIT Patna.

She said the government will establish five national Centres of Excellence (CoE) for skilling, a new CoE in Artificial Intelligence (AI) for education, and 50,000 Atal Tinkering Labs at government schools along with broadband connectivity to all government secondary schools under BharatNet. Sitharaman earm...