Wednesday, November 26, 2008

Privatisation Of Education In India: ...



Privatisation Of Education In India: An Agenda Of The Global Market
Professor Anil Sadgopal



[We are publishing this article for an in-depth discussion on this vital issue - Red Star]



as the year 2005 was coming to a close, the legislative mind of the Indian Parliament was engaged in a heated debate over the Constitution (104th) Amendment Bill. The Bill aimed at providing for reservation for the socially and educationally backward classes, besides the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes, in private unaided educational institutions. The immediate provocation for the Bill was the most unfortunate judgment by the Supreme Court exempting the unaided institutions from the requirement to provide such reservations on the ground that the State cannot interfere when public funds are not involved. This means that the highest court of the land preferred to exempt the unaided institutions from even a modicum of social responsibility, even though they derive a range of both direct and indirect benefits and protection from the State.



We may recall that this is the same Court which had the wisdom in the early 1990s (Unnikrishnan Judgment, 1993) to read Article 45 (Part IV) of the Constitution in ‘harmonious construction’ with Article 21 (Part III). This creative and pro-people reading of the Constitution enabled the Court to rule that education of children up to 14 years of age (including those below six years of age) had become a Fundamental Right, since the Right to Life (Article 21) loses its meaning without education. The Supreme Court went on to further rule that the Right to Education exists, as per Article 41, even after the age of 14 years but is limited by the “economic capacity and [the stage of] development” of the State. This implied a Right to Education all the way from pre-primary stage to higher and technical education, the aforesaid limitation applying only to education after the elementary stage i.e. beyond Class VIII. It follows that the State cannot cite any limitation, financial or otherwise, with the purpose of denying free elementary education to all. The shift in the mindset of the Supreme Court during the past decade is indicative of the change in the global economic order as well as the Indian political economy where the market interests boldly advance and the State timidly withdraws unmindful of its Constitutional obligations.



Back to the debate on Constitution (104th) Amendment Bill. The Bill was passed in both Houses of the Parliament with a comfortable majority. What does this signify? Does it mean that the government has decided to reverse its current policy of promoting privatization of education? Does it mean that the State has decided to reassert its control over the institutions which do not receive public funds? Or does it mean that the apparently wide spectrum of political opinion which ensured the passage of this Bill will henceforth join the struggle of the masses for their Right to receive education of equitable quality – a Right denied to them since independence? The available evidence does not merit any such inference. Instead, the support for the Bill was by and large perceived as a result of the overriding myopic concern of the political parties for their respective vote banks.



What is noteworthy in the entire Parliamentary debate and the follow-up media commentary and even scholarly writings – whether in support of or against the Bill – was the lack of any concern that a majority of the SCs and STs have never been even eligible for reservations. This is because almost 60% or more of the dalit and tribal children are deprived of even elementary education (i.e. up to Class VIII) and nearly 80% of the SC and ST girls do not reach Class X.3  Given the high failure rate in the Class X public examinations, it would be safe to conclude4  that not more than 8-9% of the SC and 5-6% of the ST children are able to get a Class XII certificate (the state of education of the muslim children, as per Sachar Committee, may be assumed to be comparable to that of the SC children). This means that less than 9% SC and 6% ST children today manage to become eligible for reservation benefits, since hardly any such benefits would be available without at least a senior secondary school certificate. The situation would have been obviously much worse in the previous decades. Yet, this shameful situation has never been a ground for either an adjournment motion or a walk out from the Parliament or a sustained political protest by any party, including those which gather votes in the name of these very constituencies. No political party has ever articulated its concern that the reservations benefits have been restricted to the privileged few among the SCs and STs since independence!



Yet, the denial of reservations in private higher education institutions by the Supreme Court is claimed to have ‘awakened the political conscience’ of the country, though the fees, donations or capitation fees charged by such institutions are far beyond the capacity of most of the socially and educationally backward classes. What happens in the realm of privatised education has almost hijacked the political discourse on education. In contrast, the far more basic issue of the need to reconstruct the education system in order to build a just, secular and democratic society and the role of the State in fulfilling its Constitutional obligation towards guaranteeing Right to Education has taken a backseat.5 



Structural Adjustments and Privatisation
While the UPA government had rushed the above-mentioned 104th Amendment Bill to the Parliament in a matter of weeks after the Supreme Court judgment, the same government failed to present the ‘Draft Right to Education Bill, 2005’ in the 2005 winter session of the Parliament despite the Presidential approval of the enabling 86th Constitutional Amendment and its Article 21A three years ago.6  The Draft Bill apparently got stuck in the Prime Minster’s office as the government was unwilling to allocate the required public funds for its implementation. The Bill has not seen the light of the day under various pretexts to date. This implies that the government is unwilling to reprioritise the Indian economy in favour of the masses, even when it concerns a Fundamental Right.7  Although various governments, irrespective of their political hues, have failed since independence to allocate adequate funds for elementary education, this tendency now stands reinforced by the IMF-World Bank regime of Structural Adjustments which requires that government spending in the social sector, particularly concerning education and health, is reduced.



Accordingly, the public expenditure on education as percentage of GDP started declining with the proclamation of the New Economic Policy in 1991 and the trend has continued till to date (except for a brief period of two years in between), despite increasing dependence on external assistance for primary education. From 1990-91 to 2005-06, the expenditure on education as a whole has declined from almost 4% of GDP to 3.5% of GDP, though more than a third of the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan (SSA) budget is presently coming from the World Bank and other international agencies and 2% education cess on various central taxes is being collected additionally. During the same period, the World Bank-sponsored projects and schemes (e.g. earlier DPEP and now SSA) promoted a range of parallel educational facilities for the poor, such as alternative schools, education guarantee centers and non-formal learning centers. The promise of the 1986 policy to provide at least three teachers and three classrooms (with a verandah) to every primary school was replaced by multi-grade teaching wherein a single teacher was trained to perform the ‘miracle’ of teaching five classes simultaneously in a single room! Apart from this, the regular teacher was replaced by an under-qualified, untrained and under-paid ‘para-teacher’ appointed on short term contract. The consequent deterioration of quality of education in the government system was followed by the expected withdrawal of even the poor children from these schools and a concomitant phenomenal rise in the number of low fee-charging poor quality private schools in the rural areas and urban slums in the 1990s. All these policy distortions, resulting from the IMF-World Bank Structural Adjustment regime and practiced earlier in DPEP, are now packaged ‘neatly’ under the banner of the much hyped SSA. As per UNESCO’s Global Monitoring Report, the ill-conceived SSA is unlikely to achieve its targets even by 2015 (this prediction is limited to only five years of primary education, rather than SSA’s objective of eight years of elementary education). The implication of SSA’s imminent collapse8  would be a rapid rise in the number of poor quality private education ‘shops’. There is plenty of evidence that the above strategy of building a multi-layered school system with inferior parallel layers was designed precisely to fulfill World Bank’s hidden agenda of privatization and commercialization. This is a brief account of how the neo-liberal agenda was promoted in India - a country known until the onset of the New Economic Policy for its vast and powerful state-sponsored school system.9   



Closing down of government schools followed by the sale of their prime property assets is now fast spreading as a nation-wide phenomenon, especially in urban areas. This is the outcome of a well-designed deliberate policy of allowing the government school system to gradually deteriorate until it is replaced by the fee-charging private schools. This is precisely what the global market forces, led by the powerful World Bank and other international funding agencies, have been working for.



While the State abdicates its Constitutional obligations, it promotes, at the same time, privatization and commercialization of school education to benefit an upward mobile minority.10  For this purpose, it extends direct subsidy to the so-called private unaided schools for the rich and upper middle class by (a) making available prime land in urban areas at highly subsidised costs; (b) exempting their income as well as donations to their Trusts/Societies under the Income Tax Act; (c) provision for the parents to claim exemption from income tax on fees paid to private schools; (d) providing trained teachers who received their diplomas/degrees through publicly subsidized teacher education programmes; and (e) giving their institutions and examinations due recognition through Government-supported CBSE or State Boards of Examinations, thereby according them the much-needed public credibility. A report of the Ministry of HRD in 2004 documented data on how the elite private unaided schools mint money, misappropriate funds and avoid paying taxes, causing substantial loss of government revenue (also documented earlier by the Santosh Duggal Committee constituted by the Delhi High Court). Ironically, the new Draft Right to Education Bill, 2008 proposes that such ‘unaided schools’ be provided government grants under various alibi, while continuing to treat them as being in the unaided category. Yet, the Draft Bill has no provision that would require the state government to regulate these institutions.



In the emerging political economy, such publicly subsidized private schools are not expected to fulfill any of their Constitutional obligations for ensuring free education of equitable quality for India’s future generations. The recent trend of some of these private schools undertaking patronizing measures (often by setting up parallel tracks of their own or running ‘afternoon centres’) for handful of deprived children must not be allowed to confuse the policy discourse. The farcical provision of 25% reservation in the private unaided schools in the Draft Right to Education Bill 2008 also falls in the same category.11  Indeed, it may be worse insofar it is akin to the neo-liberal School Voucher Scheme, proposed in the XI Plan, wherein public funds are transferred to promote private schooling. In contrast, the State expresses its desperation regarding lack of resources for fulfilling its Constitutional obligations, unless external aid is increased, seemingly unmindful of the ways in which India’s education policy and agenda have been already undermined by the neo-liberal policy framework.



Market Ideology and Paradigm Shift
There is much more to the market agenda in education than merely privatization and commercialization of institutions. Globalisation has both used and adjusted with the colonial paradigm of appropriating and distorting people’s knowledge. Let us recall here the Macauleyan emphasis in early nineteenth century on controlling and re-orienting higher education in colonial India at the very outset of the colonial rule and imposition of English as the medium of instruction (not education!).12  The space given in the Macauley’s Minutes of 1835 to belittling the significance of Indian literature was by no means a naïve or ill-informed observation. The British policy of building the hegemony of English over all Indian languages was founded on the premise that language is a powerful means of manipulating, distorting and controlling thought. Its impact can be now seen in the ways in which the neo-liberal objectives of market economy are being promoted in India, especially through Information and Communication Technology (ICT), dominantly operating through English. This almost unchallenged ‘victory’ would not have come about so uncritically without the global market co-opting and using most of the Indian intelligentsia, trained to think only in English. The ever widening gulf between the intelligentsia and the masses can be, to a great extent, ascribed to this linguistic hegemony. This is why we see that those market gurus who promote the market ideology in India also simultaneously and aggressively advocate the replacement of Indian languages by English as the medium of instruction (again not education). Therefore, any political programme of transformation of India’s education system would have to deal with this Macauleyan strategy of social manipulation and thought control.13  



The colonial powers also knew well (as do the forces of the neo-liberal capital) that it is the higher education sector that generates new knowledge and influences the character and content of development. It is with this understanding that the Ambani-Birla Report, submitted to the Prime Minister’s Council on Trade & Industry in April 2000, recommended that the entire higher education sector must be allowed to be privatized, while gradually withdrawing public support from secondary education. In contrast, the report envisaged continuation of public support to elementary education, at least for the time being, citing research evidence regarding higher rates of return on investment in primary education than in secondary and higher education.14  The report further recommended that all those disciplines at higher education level (this includes all sciences and social sciences and even disciplines of humanities such as linguistics) that have a market value must not be supported by the State funds. This implies that the nature of knowledge in sciences and social sciences will henceforth be determined by the market forces. Since the knowledge that informs school education from pre-primary level upwards is also generated in the higher education sector (e.g. teacher education and educational psychology), the Ambani-Birla Report implies that education at all levels, including elementary education, must be determined by the market forces. 
The impact of the neo-liberal agenda on the Indian education policies must not be underestimated. Education in this framework is no more viewed as a process of socio-political development, enlightenment and emancipation but more as an investment for developing human resource, improving productivity and expanding global market. In the case of women, education is expected to lower infant and child mortality rates, reduce fertility rates and improve household nutrition and health.15  These innocuous looking statements of the purpose of education amount to a major paradigm shift towards an instrumentalist view of education. The dominant neo-liberal features of education with serious epistemic (i.e. knowledge-related) and associated implications which emerge out of this paradigm shift, may be identified as follows:



Ø trivialisation of the goals of education e.g. confusing education with merely literacy-numeracy or life skills, as was the dominant theme of the Total Literacy Campaigns of the 1990s under the National Literacy Mission;
Ø fragmentation of knowledge in terms of marketable competencies, as has been done in Minimum Levels of Learning (MLLs) by the Ministry of HRD;
Ø alienation of knowledge from its social ethos and material base; this can be seen in promotion of uncritical dependence, tending to be almost parasitic, on Information Technology (IT);
Ø increasingly dominant role of the global market forces in determination of the character of knowledge and educational planning (e.g. IT transnationals dictating curriculum and pedagogy or corporate houses being invited in policy formulation by the Planning Commission and the state governments16 );
Ø institutionalisation of economic, technological and socio-cultural hegemony of the international agencies in educational and policy research e.g. the space being given to the World Bank, UN agencies, corporate houses and their foundations, foreign universities and externally funded researches and projects in decision-making17 ;
Ø introduction of parallel and hierarchical educational streams for different social segments, e.g. earlier in DPEP and at present in SSA;
Ø marginalisation of poor children and youth as well as the economically backward regions through competitive screening18  and a discriminatory system of institutional assessment and accreditation (e.g. NAAC in higher education); and
Ø attrition of the State-supported and democratic structures for educational planning, finance allocation and management19 .



Globalisation vs. Social Development: A Knowledge-based Conflict
We have already examined the market framework in which educational aims are being trivialized and curricular knowledge is either being reduced to mere literacy skills (for reading product labels and prices) or fragmented into bits of information or competencies (for reading factory instructions, punching keys on the computer keyboard or accepting the dictates of the market uncritically). This amounts to negation of a holistic approach to building up a democratic, enlightened and humane society. In this neo-liberal paradigm, knowledge in science, social science and humanities would need to be divested of its philosophical, historical, ethical, socio-cultural and aesthetic roots. Inter-linkage between knowledge (which is viewed in the globalised world as being synonymous with mere information) and its roots would not carry any price tag in the market economy. The inter-linkage, however, has immense significance for socio-political re-construction and transformation. In this sense, there is a fundamental conflict of epistemological nature (i.e. related to the source and character of knowledge) between the neo-liberal political economy, on the one hand, and socio-political development for a democratic and just society, on the other.



Alienation of knowledge from social ethos is a logical outcome of globalisation. Increasing preference for internet as source of ‘knowledge’ (read information) and its continuous screening or filtration by corporate forces on the basis of marketability will lead to uprooting of a substantial proportion of knowledge from its social ethos. It is well-established how the TRP value has become the major determinant of what the TV media will interject into our homes and what it will exclude. Also, those communities, sections of society or nations that are denied equitable access to digital technology or English language, the dominant IT language, will neither be able to share the digitalized knowledge nor be able to contribute their own knowledge for human progress. The geo-cultural diversity will come to be largely ignored and eventually have little role to play in defining or qualifying knowledge. This trend will, over a period of time, establish the hegemony of only globally acceptable (i.e. marketable) parameters of what is worth knowing.



Commercialisation of higher education has been promoted under the false argument that resources need to be shifted from this sector to the primary education sector, as strongly advocated by the Ambani-Birla Report.  It needs to be emphasised that knowledge is produced and communicated in institutions of higher learning.  This holds true even for knowledge that is essential for improving the curriculum, pedagogy and the quality of teacher education programmes for school education.  Any reduction in public expenditure in higher education will lead to the following anomalies:



a)  Only those disciplines or sub-disciplines will be allowed to survive that have a marketable value; the rest of the disciplines, irrespective of their socio-cultural or epistemic (knowledge-related) significance, will gradually wither away;
b)   The lower middle class and the deprived sections of society are likely to be denied access to this knowledge as well as participation in generating and re-constructing it; this will lead to further reinforcement of elitist hegemonic control over knowledge and its social application;
c) The entire higher education system will become oriented to only utilitarian goals, while any knowledge that might lead towards social development or transformation will be marginalised.
The following somewhat humorous but scary futuristic description of higher education may be cited from an epilogue I wrote four years ago at the peak of former U.S. President Clinton’s visit to India:
“Year 2010.  The ultramodern campus of the newly established `Bill Clinton International University’ near Delhi. Two women students meet. One calls out to the other, ‘Come, let us go somewhere and relax’ The other student says, ‘I have a packed day today.  In the first period, there is Unilever practical in the Coca-Cola Physics Lab; in the second period, there is the Proctor & Gambles session on Western Dance Appreciation in the Pepsi Theatre; this will be followed by the Suzuki Lecture on Information Technology in the Microsoft Auditorium.  And then the recess.  Come, let us meet in the Kentucky Chicken Canteen in the Union Carbide Square.”
- Excerpted and translated from Hindi
from the Epilogue to author’s book entitled,
‘Shiksha Mein Badlav ka Sawaal’, Granth Shilpi, New Delhi, 2000, p. 257.  
May be this fanciful but dangerous scenario will seem more plausible today if one reads Bill Gates in place of Bill Clinton!



Homogenisation, Standardisation and Centralisation: The Hidden Agenda
The market economy demands that multi-cultural, multi-linguistic or multi-ethnic societies are homogenised. The greater the homogenisation (also read, standardisation), the greater will be the size of the market for a specific product. An editorial in a UNESCO Newsletter (2002) advocated ‘commoditisation of learning material’ for reducing the cost of production. Indeed, globalisation has the hidden agenda of minimising cultural diversity even across national boundaries. A document released jointly by UNESCO’s International Bureau of Education and CBSE (UNESCO & CBSE, 2000; p. 10)20  notes that globalisation is leading to ‘erosion of the power of nation-states’, concomitant with the ‘transfer of sovereignty’ from governments to larger geo-political regional entities (e.g. ASEAN, CIS, European Union etc.). The same document further recognises that the development of multi-national corporations has contributed to ‘dramatic increase in trans-border exchanges’ (p. 10). With the increasing dominance of ICT in the promotion of ‘knowledge industry’, one can easily see how the process of globalisation is leading towards irreversible homogenisation of plural cultures, ethnicities and languages with the objective of enhancing the hegemony of corporate powers (McDonalds and Kentucky Chickens are not mere icons but represent the substantive content of this homogenization agenda!). The inclusion of these concepts in a UNESCO document shows that the international educational bureaucracy, including the UN agencies (with prominent participation of its Indian counterpart), has readily accepted the ideological dominance of globalisation and, that too, with an undercurrent of admiration!   



Let us now examine how the Indian State is preparing itself to support the impetus given by globalisation to homogenisation of plurality. In spite of market’s rhetoric of ‘choice’, there is evidence in the neo-liberal policy documents of increasing tendency towards centralization – of course, not vested in the State but in the global capital. These are reflected in concrete measures relating to curriculum formation, textbook writing, preparation of ‘modular instructional packages’ and ‘encapsulated orientation materials’, distance learning programmes (including teacher education) telecast through satellite-based technology and standardisation of evaluative criteria and testing services. The setting up of national level mechanisms for testing ‘products’ of higher education and assessment and accreditation of institutions (e.g. National Assessment and Accreditation Council or NAAC and the rising advocacy of international accreditation agencies such as ISO, ICRA and CRISIL) are part of the market agenda for standardization and commoditization of education.



In a society like ours which is characterized by disparities at all levels – social, cultural, linguistic, gender and regional – any agenda for uncontrolled standardization, both within and across nations, implies promotion of unequal development and further denial of justice. What is needed instead is a policy aimed at equitable development, particularly in the educational sector, which can respond to socio-economic and geo-cultural factors.



The phenomenon of ‘erosion of the power of the nation-states’ and ‘transfer of sovereignty’ from nations to trans-national corporations will form the cutting edge of globalisation. However, this has to be couched in a language that would be politically acceptable. The global market forces have, therefore, discovered that ‘interdependence and interrelationships between peoples and cultures’ is the major consequence of globalisation (UNESCO & CBSE, 2000, p. 5). The International Commission on Education’s Report (i.e. Delors Commission’s Report, 1996)21  to UNESCO states that ‘learning to live together’ must be one of the pillars of globalised education (p. 22).  We must inquire into the real reason behind this sudden respect for ‘learning to live together’, while the same forces also recognise that globalisation is widening the gap between ‘those who globalise and those who are globalised’ (UNESCO & CBSE, 2000, p. 12).  What is so new in this concept that, all of a sudden, an International Commission on Education, followed by a host of international agencies, has discovered in it the guidelines for re-moulding the curriculum of all nations, especially the developing ones? We already have the International Baccalaureate and an Australian agency affiliating private schools in India by charging them excessive fees and promising their students ready access to European and North American educational institutions. Incidentally, this shift from Indian examination boards to international agencies shall free these private schools from the requirement to abide by Indian Constitution. This is precisely what the new Draft Right to Education Bill, 2008 shall also promote and legitimise.



In the paradigm of globalisation, the Universities are being perceived as ‘knowledge producers’ and the students as ‘knowledge consumers’, with the hitherto hallowed institutions like science museums playing the intermediary role of ‘information brokers’ (UNESCO & CBSE, 2000, p. 11). This perception provides the underlying principle of globalised education for turning knowledge into a commodity. It is already envisaged, as is also the case with the UGC’s Model Act, that the task of producing and disseminating knowledge in the Universities through ICT will be increasingly commercialised and handed over to the trans-national corporations in the near future.  The ‘producer-broker-consumer’ paradigm will begin to define the agenda of globalised education. The global corporate sector is now greedily estimating the Indian “current private education market at [US] $ 40 billion [or Rs. 1,84,000 crore] a year which could expand to [US] $ 120 billion [or Rs. 5,52,000 crore] in 10 years or so”.22  In order to capture this industry, an international legally enforceable instrument called General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS) has been prepared which will ensure that the paradigm shift of converting education into a marketable ‘service’ or commodity (from an entitlement or Right) receives the final stamp of the neo-liberal capital and the developing nations lose control over their own education systems and, therefore, also of their destiny.


As far as education is concerned, this will be the ultimate implication of the imperialist glabalisation!
Concluding Remarks
It is a matter of serious concern that the Common Minimum Programme (CMP) of the UPA Government also continues to suffer from several of the lacunae and contradictions that have afflicted policy formulation since independence. More significantly, it shows no evidence of consciousness of the challenge posed by the neo-liberal agenda on the character of our education policies and the system as a whole. In this respect, except for the NDA Government’s overt agenda of communalization of education, the UPA Government is only extending the NDA agenda of commoditization of education and handing over its control on a platter to the neo-liberal capital. Few would disagree that the XI Five Year Plan (prepared by the UPA Government) is only a continuation and ‘enrichment’ of the neo-liberal policy framework of the Tenth Five Year Plan (prepared by the NDA Government). For instance, the idea of Public-Private Partnership (PPP)23  in education was initially included in NDA’s manifesto in 1999, promoted through a Planning Commission Committee in 2003 and finally implemented by the UPA Government’s XI Five Year Plan in 2007 (e.g. 2,500 schools out of the 6,000 Model Schools will be in the PPP mode)! The approval of both the Plans at the respective meetings of the National Development Council (wherein all Chief Ministers, representing various political parties and their alliances, participate), implies a basic consensus on the content of political economy across the political spectrum in the Parliament. To be sure, to the dismay of the masses, this consensus includes the Left Front, at least as far as the educational agenda is concerned.



It would not be an overstatement to assert that this policy of exclusion and discrimination amounts to denial of knowledge to at least three-fourth of India’s people, while also preventing them from participation in its creation as well as control. In this sense, the stance of the Indian State and its collusion with the forces of imperialist globalization needs to be viewed as a knowledge-related assault on Indian society. The assault is designed to control the access, production and distribution of knowledge across nations and social classes, as the Indian State, too, is aspiring to become a junior ‘strategic partner’ of the U.S. superpower. It is only by manipulating, controlling and distorting knowledge that these forces can dictate their neo-liberal agenda to various nations and large sections of the global society. The design for the attrition of the relatively democratic, secular and egalitarian Constitution and, therefore, of India’s sovereignty is almost staring at us. The process can be reversed only when, and if, a genuine grassroots political movement, supported by the progressive sections of society and infused with a consciousness of the dangers inherent in this epistemic (knowledge-related) assault, is built up for redeeming India’s freedom and re-asserting national sovereignty in policy formulation – for promoting peace based on equality and human dignity both within India and across nations!



Footnotes:
1An updated version of the article published in COMBAT LAW, New Delhi, February-March 2006, pp. 22-28.
2Senior Fellow, Nehru Memorial Museum & Library, New Delhi (2001-06); Dean, Faculty of Education, University of Delhi (1998-2001); Member, National Commission on Teachers (1983-84); Member, National Policy on Education-1986 Review Committee (1990); Member, Central Advisory Board of Education (2004-06); Member, National Steering Committee of National Curriculum Framework-2005 (2004-05); Chairperson, National Focus Group on ‘Work and Education’, NCERT (2004-05); Member, Common School System Commission, Bihar (2006-07).
3Based on data on the out-of-school children (NSSO, Govt. of India) plus the Drop Out Rates for SCs and STs (Selected Educational Statistics 2004-05, Ministry of HRD, Govt. of India: Tables 18-19).
4The Govt. of India has preferred to avoid publishing data of the Drop Out Rates at the senior secondary stage i.e. Class XII since 1980 or even before. 
5A mass dharna held at Delhi in July 2006 was demanding a central Act on Fundamental Right to Education. Its delegation, while presenting a Memorandum to the PM, met a senior official of the PM’s office dealing with education. The delegation was told that the ongoing reservation debate had shifted the entire focus from elementary education to provision of increased seats in professional institutions in order to compensate the upper castes due to the proposed 27% reservation for the OBCs. This, according to the PMO, would lead to a two-fold increase in allocations for higher education. Implicitly, these additional resources would be mobilised by diverting them from elementary education and shelving the Right to Education Bill! This is precisely what has happened in 2008-09 when most of the enhancement in the central education budget is due to either higher education (as indicated above) or secondary education (for setting up elite 6,000 Model Schools and skill formation for the global market). In contrast, allocations for elementary education have remained static and the Right to Education Bill stands shelved!
6Previous to the UPA government, the NDA government also sat over its three successive drafts for more that a year but lacked courage to go to the Parliament to seek its approval. 
7As noted earlier, no political party needed to have waited for the 86th Constitutional Amendment (December 2002) in order to pass an Act for giving Fundamental Right. This is because the Fundamental Right has existed since Supreme Court’s Unnikrishnan Judgment, 1993 and this was far more powerful than what was given under 86th Amendment. Yet, no political party adopted it as its agenda.  
8It is the World Bank-directed design of SSA which is misconceived and basically responsible for its collapse, rather than the centre-promoted falsehood of its poor implementation by the states. How can a misconceived programme be successful, howsoever efficient be its implementation?
9For a more detailed description and analysis of the neo-liberal impact on Indian education system, see my essays viz. (a) ‘Dilution, Distortion and Diversion: A Post-Jomtien Reflection on the Education Policy’ in The Crisis of Elementary Education in India (Ed. Ravi Kumar), SAGE Publications, New Delhi, pp. 92-136, 2006; and (b) ‘Common School System and the Future of India’, JANATA, Vol. 63, No. 16, May 11, 2008, pp. 1-32, Mumbai.
10How powerfully brazen is the private school lobby can be judged by the fact that a high profile private school in Delhi called the Sanskriti School was recently able to procure a substantial grant from the Ministry of HRD for its auditorium and other facilities, while the same Ministry was promoting the disgraceful multi-grade teaching for the poor masses. Reportedly, this ill-intentioned grant was withdrawn when a PIL was filed in the Delhi High Court.   
11This 25% provision has been designed to divert political attention from the emerging discourse on the Common School System based on Neighbourhood Schools. For a critique of the Draft Right to Education Bill, 2008, see my article ‘C for Commerce’ in TEHELKA, 14 June 2008, pp. 44-45.
12The difference between instruction and education may be noted. The State or the colonial rule would give instruction in schools in order to promote its agenda and reproduce itself. Obviously, the State, least of all the colonial rule or a neo-liberal State, is not expected to provide education that liberates
13The programme of building a Common School System in India would necessarily have to deal with this issue and institute a language policy rooted in the universal pedagogical principles (with mother tongue and/or the regional language playing the critical role) for all children, irrespective of their class, caste, religion, gender or locale, whether studying in government or private unaided schools.
14Most of the research advocating this argument of ‘higher rates of return’ from primary education has been funded and promoted by the World Bank and its allied international funding agencies. Apart from questioning the empirical evidence, it is critical that this rationale for restricting public funding only to primary education is challenged in terms of its fragmented vision of education in which secondary and higher education are falsely juxtaposed against primary education, thereby denying the mutually supportive and enriching roles of otherwise organically related stages of education.
15See Primary Education in India, World Bank, Allied Publishers Limited, New Delhi, pp.  30-31, 39.
16For instance, the Karnataka state government has constituted a World Bank-assisted body under Wipro’s Azim Premji Foundation chairpersonship to advise on policy matters and also invited the same corporate group in 2007 to set up SIEMAT, a formal institutional structure for policy formulation relating to educational governance and teacher training - a move stalled due to public protests. In April 2008, the Planning Commission invited 18 leading corporate houses to consult them on how to promote ‘Public-Private Partnership’ in education. Not a single educationist, not even NCERT, was invited.
17For instance, the World Bank-sponsored research on teacher absenteeism and James Tooley’s study of Shahadara’s low fee-charging private schools in Delhi have suddenly attracted over-blown attention in policy formulation and the media, though both lack in methodology and socio-political perspective.
18A practice already institutionalized in Kendriya and Navodaya Vidyalayas is about to be extended to the 6,000 newly proposed Model Schools in the XI Five Year Plan.
19The proposal of school vouchers and Public-Private Partnership in education has entered the XI Five Year Plan in December 2007 without such recommendation by either the CABE or any of its seven sub-committee reports in July 2005, in spite of the CABE being the highest democratic consultative structure (with representation of all state/UT education ministers, central educational authorities, academicians, writers, artists and social activists) for policy advice in education. 
20International Bureau of Education (UNESCO) and Central Board of Secondary Education (India) (2000), Globalisation and Living Together, The Challenges for Educational Content in Asia, UNESCO, Paris & CBSE, New Delhi.
21Delors, Jacques et al (1996, 1998), Learning: The Treasure Within, Report to UNESCO of the International Commission on Education for the Twenty-first Century, UNESCO, Paris. 
22Karunakaran, Naren, Secessions and Great Escapes, OUTLOOK BUSINESS, August 23, 2008, p. 76.
23For a comprehensive critique of XI Five Year Plan’s push for Public-Private Partnership in education and school vouchers, see my Hindi interview, Sarvajanik ‘Sajhedaaree’ Ya Loot, Shiksha-Vimarsh, Jaipur, January-April, 2008, p. 68-96.


Box I
Policy of Demolishing  overnment School System

The following
news item ironically appeared on International Literacy Day, 2004.
“Facing a shortage of students, the Directorate of Education [Delhi] has decided to close down 53 government schools, many of which are in old Delhi. This is in addition to (the) 55 schools already closed . . . . . We have seen a steady decline in enrollment in government schools.”
Hindustan Times, 8th September 2004
Instead of showing concern and taking steps to improve the functioning of the government school system, the authorities seemed to be celebrating the closure. They declared,
“The closure of the schools helps the Directorate in two ways. Firstly, the teachers can be posted in schools having few teachers. Secondly, there is saving on annual expenditure of maintenance and repairs.”
Hindustan Times, 8th September 2004
During the previous couple of years, almost 150 government schools have been closed down in Delhi alone. The government schools in Delhi have almost 70% of the school-going children of the metropolis. Close all of them and the Directorate will be helped maximally! It will save its entire annual expenditure!!
This is not the first time that India has witnessed such a phenomenon. In 1999-2000, 30 government schools in the city of Indore (Madhya Pradesh) were closed down and their campuses, located on prime lands in the heart of the city, were either converted into police stations or handed over to private interests for developing commercial complexes. The District Collector, in his report to the Chief Minister, proudly called it a process of ‘rationalisation’! No one cared to know as to where had all the children gone! All of them had joined the rapidly mushrooming low-fee charging school shops in the neighbourhood of the erstwhile government schools.
Reports of deterioration of the quality of education in government schools followed by their closure have come from Hyderabad, Chennai and even smaller towns. The Punjab Government has ‘proactively’ floated tenders for the sale of state school campuses.  Such ‘rationalisation’ now provides the basic rationale for the governments in different states for promoting private fee-charging ‘unaided’ schools, preferably through Public-Private Partnership (PPP). It does not seem to make any difference to anyone who matters in political power if the consequence of this ‘rationalisation’ is denial of education to the underprivileged children, particularly the girls.
Anil Sadgopal



Box II
Commoditization and Co-option of Language

It was a forenoon of the year 2005 when the meeting of the committee constituted by the Central Advisory Board of Education (CABE) on ‘Universalisation of Secondary Education’ was in progress. The Member-Secretary placed a document received from the Ministry of HRD for being considered by the committee. The covering letter stated that the document represented the proceedings of a meeting the Ministry had with the ASSOCHAM on the subject of the role of private ‘education providers’ in the field of secondary education. The letter further suggested that the committee may like to consider the document which talked of the need to change the CBSE rules governing affiliation of private schools such that the corporate houses registered under the companies act may also be eligible for starting schools and getting them affiliated with CBSE.  The document wondered: Now that education has become a commodity, what is wrong in making profit out of it!  Ten years ago, such a statement would have been inconceivable even as a casual remark in the corridors of the Ministry.
Before the year 2005 ended, a 30-page document entitled, ‘Preliminary Recommendations for Higher Education’ was submitted by the Education Promotion Society for India (EPSI) to the Ministry. Some excerpts from the EPSI document followed by my comments:
“Review of National Education Policy, 1986 which is not in tune and has diluted relevance in conjunction with the current economic and knowledge development scenario in the country also in perspective of global developments such as WTO agreement.”
Comment: Does it matter at all that the 1986 policy has also failed to provide education of equitable quality to all children, as required by the Constitution? Or may be the Constitution is also not in tune with the WTO agreement!
“Need for Higher level of involvement of the industry since, they are the direct beneficiary for formulation of relevance and employable curricula.”
Comment: It would certainly not occur to the private “education providers” that crores of housewives, farmers, artisans, minor forest produce gatherers, fishermen, construction workers, miners, cooks, weavers, painters, leather curers and shoe makers, dais, vaids and yunani practitioners, auto garage mechanics, die makers, plumbers, electricians, gadget repairers, well diggers, diamond cutters and such other producers of national wealth are also “direct beneficiaries” and should have a say in “formulation of relevance and employable curricula”.
“Fixation of fees to be left to supply and demand. The fees can be raised to the level of realistic cost of education. The equitable fee will enable the institution to be both independent, self-reliant and grow with their own resources.”
Comment: Neither the users of the English language nor the economists (not even the neo-liberal ones) could have probably ever imagined the use of the term “equitable” in such a context. The sociological meaning of “equitable” will henceforth be determined by the balance of supply and demand, rather by the sense of equality and social justice!
Let no one be surprised if the Ministry endorses the EPSI proposals since EPSI has the support of three major national chambers of commerce and industry viz. CII, ASSOCHAM and PHDCCI.
Anil Sadgopal


Box III
Right to Education and the Private School

The Draft Right
to Education Bill, 2008 requires that private unaided schools provide 25% free seats for children belonging to the weaker sections who reside in the school’s neighbourhood. For fulfilling this social obligation, the private schools shall be reimbursed by the government at the rate at which the state schools spend on a per child basis. This is precisely what would be done if Voucher Schools are implemented as per the XI Five Year Plan. Even this limited ‘social obligation’ of the private schools shall end when the child completes elementary education of eight years. These schools shall be then free to throw the child out of the school since the government will stop reimbursing them!
This provision, at its best, is expected to benefit merely a handful of the under-privileged living in the neighbourhood of supposedly ‘high quality’ expensive urban private schools. But the issue of 25% free seats has made it possible for the entire discourse on Right to Education to be hijacked. Most of the debate is about whether this provision is feasible or not. Hardly any one is talking about what would happen to the right of the vast majority of the under-privileged (estimated to be at least 19 crore out of 20 crore children in the 6-14 years age group) who won’t be benefited by this provision. This lopsided discussion has diverted public attention from the critical issue of the need to build a Common School System based on neighbourhood schools – a concept which would be entirely marginalised as a consequence of the Draft Bill. Possibly, such a diversion of political discourse is precisely what the misconceived 25% provision is aimed at.
There is also a provision for the government to extend financial support to the private unaided school if the latter lacks resources for infrastructural development as per the Schedule of norms given in the Draft Bill. Yet, such a school will continue to be treated as an ‘unaided school’! Further, the Draft Bill makes it legitimate for the private school to levy ‘capitation fees’ and any other charges it deems fit provided the school declares them at the time of admissions!
After the passage of the Bill, the state government shall be free to withdraw their existing Acts for regulation of private schools as the Bill does not have any such requirement. Given the proactive private school lobby, this is precisely what the state governments shall be persuaded to do.
Let us further note that the Draft Bill has no provision requiring the State to provide adequate financial resources for either fulfillment of Article 21A of the Constitution or implementation of the proposed legislation. There is only some unnecessary and cryptic reference to the sharing of the cost of implementation between the centre and the states. We have a Finance Commission for this. Why do we require this superfluous provision? Gone is the Kothari Commission’s clarion call or the 1986 policy resolution to raise the level of educational expenditure to at least 6% of GDP per year. Given this mood of the government, where is the space to talk of filling up the cumulative gap of investment building up for more than four decades? The High Level Group of Ministers looking into this Bill has even discussed the possibility of diluting the already diluted norms given in the Schedule. Surely, their grandchildren don’t have to go to these government schools! Nothing could please the private ‘education providers’ more!!
Finally, the Draft Bill fails to even recognise the rapidly increasing role of FDI, external assistance and international examination/ affiliating bodies (e.g. International Baccalaureate) in school education, all of which are designed to derail, if not even demolish the Indian school system.
The Draft Bill thus offers the nation a perfect recipe for implementing the market agenda of school education!
Anil Sadgopal


 


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