Education Markets and the NEP

The neoliberal agenda in the National Educational Policy especially in the area of tertiary education in India needs more scrutiny.

 

In August 2021, Karnataka became the first state to implement the new National Education Policy (NEP), a vision and philosophy for education which also aims to revolutionise the education system in India. Any plan to revamp the system is laudable. Changing times often require upgrades and overhaul. However, when it is guided by ulterior motives, other than facilitating quality education, the NEP has raised more questions that it has answers for its implementation.

Normally it takes time, in terms of years, if not decades, to bring in such drastic changes as indicated in the NEP, but in the UG college where I teach media studies and visual communication, the new academic session was scheduled to begin in the second week of August 2021 and the Karnataka government announced about the implementation merely a week before about the scheduled opening of the new academic session, and thereby delaying the commencement of first-semester students who are going to be the first batch under the new regulation.

For obvious reasons, the present regime desperately wants to either rebuild or redo every available system that was created by the previous government known for its so-called dynasty politics. Much more than this political and cultural rivalry, the present government is also a diehard fan of neoliberalism, and it wants to incorporate the idea of free-market capitalism in every major decision-making apparatus of the State. This is where the NEP, despite its other strong or weak points, still covers a substantial area that we need to uncover.

Before we talk about the agenda of free-market fans in the education system, the history of this relatively new policy goes back to 2016 when former cabinet secretary TSR Sumbramanian was appointed to chair a committee to formulate a new educational framework. In those days the process was opaque because hardly anyone had seen the reports of the committee albeit there are records showing that the committee had revised the reports nearly six times and created as many drafts as possible. Instead, a new document titled as the Draft Input for Education Policy was released in July of that year. Among other things, a prominent feature of the document was its alignment to the agenda of the World Trade Organisation.

Two years later, the former Ministry of Human Resource Development that has now become the Ministry of Education announced for the first time that there will be a national education policy. Yet it took shape only when Narendra Modi came back for his second term in 2019 and re-announced the introduction of the new policy. Back then, another committee headed by Krishnaswamy Kasturirangan, former chief of the Indian Space Research Organisation, prepared and released a 484-page document reportedly seeking suggestions from the public and stakeholders. 

A few months later, another summarised version of the document running up to 55 pages was released in October 2019. Referring to the timeline, amidst the countrywide protests against the then Citizenship Amendment Bill that eventually became an act, another 60-page document was released in December 2019. It went on like this, but public records show that there was neither consultation with the stakeholders nor it was properly discussed in the Parliament – like how it has been for several core issues of the country – before the policy was given the green signal for implementation. This is another grim reminder that India is currently under a government that makes no distinction between democratic and iron-fist rules.

Finally, earlier this year (2021) on 29 July, the Union Cabinet announced the adoption of the National Education Policy, and the Ministry of Education hurriedly released a 66-page document with slight changes in the content, which more or less was based on the Kasturirangan report. Now in its concrete form, it is hard to miss the emphasis that the policy has on privatisation and commercialisation, and not to exclude the apparent saffronisation and centralisation of the education system.

The Force from Within and Without

In The regulation of education through the WTO/GATS, Angela C de Siqueira – from the Universidade Federal Fluminense, Brazil in which she analyses the documents from the World Trade Organisation and its General Agreement on Trade in Services, and proposals presented by various countries, demonstrating their interests in eliminating ‘barriers’ to ‘free trade’ in education – mentions:

The richest countries, having the majority of their population already schooled, with a decreasing birth rate and ample educational systems in operation, are becoming a restricted market for the operation of companies in the educational sector. On the other hand, developing countries – whose majority of inhabitants are at the school age, and therefore, represent a great demand in potential for the educational offerings at several levels – are the preferred targets of the business groups’ search for new markets.

For that matter, it is an open secret that the WTO and its treaty GATS have been created solely for the interest of corporate houses and their owners, thanks to the US, the EU, Japan and their ilk. Their belief is that free trade will solve all the problems of humanity and their agenda is to deregulate international markets, an idea which has appealed to the present government in India the most. 

This observation is also quite relevant to the NEP, according to which we will see various foreign universities opening their campuses in the country. Unfortunately, this can also put the final nail in the coffin of the public education system and further the mass exclusion of marginalised people from the system.

In the words of Dr Prem Singh from the University of Delhi: ‘The nature of knowledge/epistemology has also been changed along with the way of imparting knowledge in [the] NEP. Knowledge is not predetermined in the context of the individual and society or the world [; but] it is a predetermined text designed to serve the existing corporate-capitalism.’ 

The credit should not go only to the present regime. Two decades ago, during the first NDA rule, Mukesh Ambani and Kumarmangalam Birla had drafted a Policy Framework for Reforms in Education (PFRE) that endorses, among other things, the establishment of private universities, depoliticisation of campuses, fee hike in universities, raising funds from internal accruals, and foreign direct investment in the higher education sector. Though it was criticised then, several ideas envisaged in the PFRE are reflected clearly in the NEP.

Radical Change Does Not Always Mean Revolution

If we go by the ideals in the NEP, it is aimed to (i) bring about a revolution in the education sphere with a completely different structure of 5+3+3+4 (against the old 10+2+3); (ii) introduce a four-year college education with multiple exit options; (iii) get rid of board exams, which is a move to make colleges and universities multidisciplinary; and (iv) focus on experiential learning and critical thinking, while setting 2040 as the deadline for full implementation of the policy, and so on.

We will be missing the woods for the trees if we focus our attention only on what is in the policy than what is not. Ideals are called ideals because those are an ideal, but it is equally important to implement it. In simple words, regardless of how ideal a policy is, the aspiration should meet the implementation. 

In the case of the NEP, it is not only implementation but also the very moral and philosophical foundation which is a problematic area. When education is made a tradable service that exists for the sake of earning profit, there is an epistemological fallacy in knowledge production. This is even truer with reference to keeping the focus of tertiary education on vocational ends.

During the UPA regime, India was forced not to sign the GATS Agreement for the same reason that education was listed as a ‘trade’. Yet the hegemony of the latter did put pressure, and not the Ministry of HRD but that of Commerce released a report, back in 2005, titled Higher Education in India and GATS: An Opportunity seeking a balance between domestic regulation and free trade. Now, the NEP has removed all the barriers though it does not even overtly mention these issues. 

What’s even worse is the centralisation of the whole system. The NEP has proposed a Higher Education Commission in India (HECI) plus four verticals: the National Higher Education Regulatory Council (NHERC), the National Accreditation Council (NAC), the Higher Education Grants Council (HEGC) and the General Education Council (GEC). The establishment of a council like that of GEC implies the loss of autonomy for colleges and universities in the long run. One cause of concern for the higher education institutes must be the Institutional Development Plans that will be prescribed by the NAC and will be a criterion for funding by HEGC.

On top of this, there is also a chance that a transnational and international organisation such as the WTO will interfere with the sovereignty of a nation. 

When there is no distinction between private and government establishments, as advocated in the NEP, there will be structural changes; some of which again are welcome, and many others are open to question. For instance, this lack of classification will also mean there will be no distinction between foreign and domestic players, which is exactly what the WTO wants.

Dr. Vijender Sharma, former president of the Delhi University Teachers’ Association, put it succinctly: ‘Commercialisation of higher education can have adverse implications, both in terms of access and equity. Commodification of education, research and knowledge will not serve the long-range interests of the nation. It could lead to truncated growth and lopsided development of higher education.’

The education sector is going to be the next crashing place for capitalists and corporate houses in which students are going to be consumers. In India, the present regime that is openly nationalist and supports Hindu hegemony considers neoliberalism as the way out for the country to become a force to reckon with. In the process, they are overlooking the future consequences of making everything a business in which only loss or profit counts. 

Organisations like the World Bank and WTO must be held accountable for destroying the functions of higher education, which include, among others, to provide an open space for debates and deliberations, the constant creation of knowledge and accentuating the awareness of issues that are of sociopolitical and economical relevance. The first resistance can come from the campuses that these organisations are planning to take over, else we will be reduced to another commodity that can be sold, bought and discarded.

This article was originally published in the November 2021 edition of Together.