The union budget is a continuation of the BJP-led NDA government’s war on the students of the country. The share of expenditure on education as a percentage of the total central budget is just 3.6 percent, which is 0.2 percent less than the revised estimates for the year 2015-16. The same figure in terms of the percentage of the total GDP, is a meagre 0.5 percent. Allocations for school education have been cut from Rs 69,794 crores in 2015-16 to Rs 63,826 crores. The finance minister in his speech has talked about an ‘enabling regulatory architecture’ for 10 public and 10 private educational institutions to be made ‘world-class’. This will enhance the dual education model that on one hand creates a miniscule number of so-called centres of excellence, while the vast majority of institutions are forced to be cash-starved. Another disturbing feature is the inclusion of 10 private institutions in this framework, which is a continuation of the regressive outlook of RUSA and other such academic reforms which have been seeking to divert public funds to private players (while there is no social control over the fees, infrastructure, teaching etc, in these institutions). A Higher Education Financing Agency (HEFA) is being setup with an initial base capital of Rs 1000 crore. The finance minister in his speech has said that ‘These funds will be used to finance improvement in infrastructure in our top institutions and will be serviced through internal accruals.’ This again means: diversion of funds to select few institutes and linking of funds to the financial performance of the institutes (since internal accruals basically refers to the accumulation of retained earnings and depreciation charges). The finance minister’s speech talks about ‘Entrepreneurship Education and Training’ through Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs). The experience of academic reforms across the globe shows that over-reliance on MOOCs as a tool of vocationalisation ends up increasing the duality within the education system and in effect serves as a means of providing cheap labour for the big business. There is lot of talk about skill development in the finance minister’s budget, but one is forced to wonder how this rhetoric will be translated into action when the allocations for UGC/IITs/IIMs/NITs have been cut by more than 50 percent. In the nut shell, the union budget carries forward the neo-liberal philosophy of limiting the public expenditure on education. It goes without saying that this budget will have adverse impact on the student community of the country.