The world economy today is largely governed by neoliberal socio-economic policies of Liberalization, Privatization, and Globalization (LPG). India surrendered to the World Bank-IMF led cartel of global financial institutions in the early 1990s. As legal terms of the surrender India had to sign treaties like General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) and General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS). These treaties basically transfer the economic sovereignty of developing countries like India to an unelected entity called World Trade Organization (WTO). WTO ensures there are no roadblocks in exploitation of the developing world by global financial conglomerates. It monitors and ensures that the members change their laws and policies to adhere to the terms of GATT and GATS. The steady erosion of fundamental rights and livelihoods as a consequence is visible in all facets of our lives. What was considered a basic right has been converted into a commodity. The changing face of the Indian education system shows the ever increasing influence of LPG.
Before the Indian Government started adopting the LPG policies, education like food, water and healthcare, was classified as a “merit good” i.e. something which is considered beneficial to the society and is therefore provided by the government for free or at a low cost. This was based on the understanding that education will lead to growth and development of individuals which in turn will lead to growth and development of the nation. Hence most schools, colleges and universities were government run. Their standards were maintained by boards run by state or central governments. The fees were nominal because providing education to the citizens was not considered a financial burden on the government but an investment for a better future.
Of course, the ruling classes did not want everybody to get education. So, in practice, access to quality education remained limited. Traditionally excluded sections were population like women (especially in rural areas) and lower classes, castes and communities. Higher education remained a bastion of upper caste Hindu men. Limited employment opportunities after graduation enabled the ruling classes to control who among the educated working classes could reap the benefits of education. So when LPG started changing the education system, there were very few protests, because the existing system was not benefiting most people anyway.
In the neoliberal outlook enforced by WTO
• Education is not a merit good but a service. So it is a commodity. So there should be no government subsidy. Corporates should be able to make profit by selling it to student- consumers.
• The only reason consumers will buy education is if it increases their future earning potential. Hence education should only provide training demanded by the multinational corporations (MNCs) to meet their global human resource demands.
In other words, education, for a common person, becomes an expensive ticket to become a slave of an MNC so that they get a few crumbs of the loot. Of course, the ruling class is complicit in this exploitation. If education was completely free, it would not have come under GATS and the government could have continued to support it even under WTO rules. Similar to what is done in other sectors, first the government system was intentionally weakened by lack of investment thereby making the entry of private sector easier. This was done by chronic underinvestment in modernization and upgradation of syllabus and the facilities and inrecruitment and training of teachers.
The goals of LPG in education can broadly be described as
• Selling education to make profit
• Using education to produce trained labour for global capital
• Control and monetize all the research and technology development
Let us briefly look at how this is done.
Liberalization relaxes the rules for setting up of schools and colleges and in training the teachers who teach in these. This results in an explosion in the number of private colleges and schools, many of them without the proper infrastructure and faculty to actually train the students in the degree they offer. When the global labour market demands English speaking labour with basic programming skills, private English medium schools and private engineering colleges grow rapidly to supply them. These institutions charge very high fees since their primary goal is to make profit by selling a product called education. There are no regulations controlling the fees, nor any oversight on the quality of the degrees they give. As a result they can get away by selling inferior products with nice packaging at a very high cost. Of course, large sections of the population are not able to pay these prices. To improve their customer base and to increase the labour supply produced for the MNCs the concept of educational loans came into being. Government controlled banks also offer such loans so that the private sector can profit from the shiny new schools and colleges they have set up. As the government withdraws the subsidies, even the fees of government colleges and IITs increase.
The overall rising costs of education virtually puts education beyond the reach of the already marginalized sections of the society. In fact the education industry has become so lucrative, that global capital wants a direct share of the profits by starting foreign university campuses in India.
Once private capital feels that India has enough urban middle class and rural upper class to sustain the education business, they shut the door for the remaining populace. This is done by introducing standardized tests for admission to the engineering colleges, in a country like India with a weak school network. An additional benefit is a growth of a new unregulated industry, the coaching centres.
The coaching centre industry has grown into a fifty thousand crore industry in the matter of decades, thanks to LPG. The human cost is not just the sections who are deprived of education, but also the middle class. The middle class takes huge loans and invests in their children for getting into a MNC via the coaching centre>engineering college route. The rising mental health issues among our youth is a testament to the havoc neoliberal policies can cause to even relatively well-off sections of the population. The standardized admission tests also serve another purpose. These are designed to reward ability to work long hours on routine problems, the very skills which are essential for joining the workforce of sweatshops of “Knowledge-based economy”.
As the students are trained specifically for the current need of the global capital, once the need is fulfilled, the jobs available to the “student-consumers” dry up. This happens either when there is surplus labour or when new technology renders a particular skill obsolete. After the market need is met, specific degree and diploma programmes, introduced without standardization, to meet the specific needs of global capital, become obsolete. Thousands of students are left holding a degree which does not help in getting a job, because that job does not exist anymore. Jobs in call centres, data entry and (very soon) coding dry up as the requirements of the market are saturated or when the demands change. The surplus labour, who are trained for only specific jobs, drive down the salary offered for these jobs.
Further, the fear of losing the job and the huge educational loan commitments ensure that the exploited workers of the “knowledge sector” cannot form unions to protest against the violations of labour laws. Liberalization ensures that the government aids the exploitation by removing all labour law requirements regarding white collar jobs. Headlines like “85% of Indian graduates are unemployable” should make us question the set up which nurtures this education system and also question what “employable” really means.
The education system, instead of being the way to meet individual aspirations and social needs of a country, becomes a conveyor belt to feed the ever hungry machine of global capital. There is however another side to the effects of LPG policy. As long as education was seen as an investment of the country in its future, all forms of knowledge were funded by the government. When education becomes a product, only the products which have “market value” become relevant. Since global capital sees no monetisation opportunity in social sciences and humanities, funding in these branches of human knowledge were cut drastically. Social scientists can critically examine the socio-political-economic environment of the world and how various policies change and affect suchstructures. So reducing funding in social sciences helps in suppressing current and future voices against neoliberalism. In the market driven world, these “arts” subjects are reduced from branches of human knowledge to “soft skills” . Even basic sciences, which do not ‘make’ products which have ‘immediate’ use, see fund cuts. Jobs in India in the fields of basic sciences, social sciences and humanities have become virtually non-existent as there is no demand for them in our “Knowledge-based economy”. There is a clear hierarchy in funding, and hence in importance, of the various branches of study. Since not the government but the private industry funds most of the research and development activity, they control the research agenda of the research and technical institutes of India. The importance of research is judged in terms of “research income” generated or in patents produced and not in terms of publications or in terms of PhD students trained to become future researchers or teachers of our country.
A couple of questions are relevant here.
1. If the education system is designed to produce mechanical robots, where is the new research and innovation coming from?
Whatever research and innovation happening in India is in spite of the system not because of the system. From the perspective of global capital, the activities of thinking, questioning, experimenting, trying out new ideas will all be done in first world countries. Of course the upper classes of the developing world can be part of that by sending their children to these countries for education. But the role of these countries is to be the service sector of the developed world, and hence their citizens will be trained only for that.
2. If the government funding in education is cut so drastically, why is that not reflected in the budget?
A couple of examples can provide an answer. The government has spent crores in building new IITs, while most of the public colleges and universities have not been given funds to recruit enough faculty for decades. They have allotted a lot of money for buying computers and smart boards in schools while giving very little for recruitment and training of teachers.
The government is basically giving public money from the education budget
• to the construction industry to build buildings.
• to MNCs to dump off unwanted and stockpiled products
• to build laboratories which can be used by the private sector companies to implement their research agenda.
Of course this is an incomplete list but looking at the details of government expenditure in education confirms this pattern. The National Education Policy (NEP 2020) is the latest step in the LPG agenda which focuses on converting the school education system to a school education industry. Fighting only against LPG policies in education does not serve any purpose. It is important to realise that the changes in the education system are a reflection of the socio-economic environment imposed by the neoliberal philosophy. While issue based protests are definitely needed, it is also necessary to be aware of the broader context.
(Author is Associate Professor in Physics at BITS Goa)
