Against Neoliberal Assault on Education in India: A Counternarrative of Resistance.
The Indian State has been demonstrating its unwavering commitment to private capital and its neoliberal offensive. The education and health sector reflect its antipeople orientation along with other anti-working class measures such as the doing away with old pension scheme, privatisation of airports, neglect of farmers resulting in over 1.5 lakh suicides across country between 1997 and 2005 (Sainath, 2007), etc. On the education front the Prime Minister Manmohan Singh in a full Planning Commission held on 13 th September 2007 showed his commitment to privatisation by stating that “we also need to recognise the role currently being played by the private sector and the policy design must factor this in” (The Hindu, 2007). A leading weekly then revealed that the Ministry of Human Resource Development (MHRD) has been trying to moot private partnership in government schools (Raman, 2008). These developments have been taking place along with number of measures that the government has been adopting (Kumar, 2008) to masquerade its real neoliberal face.
The Charge of Neoliberal Brigade and Higher Education in India.
This paper looks at the state of higher education in India – in terms of policies and the trajectory that it has taken in the aftermath of neoliberalisation of the economy. Through studying the discourses that construct the edifice of the educational complex in the country, it unravels the dynamics of how economy, politics and education interact. Lastly, it explores the possibilities of countering the neoliberal offensive of capital and create a more egalitarian higher education system.
Schools Under New Labour — Getting Down to Business
I want to begin by making a distinction between a business agenda for schools and an agenda for business in schools. The first agenda — what business wants schools to do — is a broad transnational consensus about the set of reforms needed for schools to meet employers’ needs in terms of the efficiency with which they produce the future workforce. The second agenda — what business itself wants to do in schools — represents the interests of a growing sector of private companies whose business is taking over the provision of state education services.