Reading Comprehension Test 25

One day, a girl asked me what exactly the word ‘liberal’ means. She wanted to know if ‘liberalization’ promotes ‘liberal’ values. She had noticed that the institutions of higher education, which are supposed to promote liberal values, were finding it difficult to resist ideological and commercial pressures of Education, which is supposed to promote liberal values, was finding it difficult to withstand ideological and commercial pressures triggered by the process of economic liberalization. Similarly, the economic liberalism was different from political liberalism? And what exactly do people mean when they refer to Neo-liberal policies? The questions she was asking could hardly be addressed without evoking the political economy that has emerged over the last three decades.

When economic liberalization gained general approval in the mid-1980s, few thought what it would mean for education. Then, in 1991, a new economic policy was dramatically announced, accompanied by a series of ‘structural adjustment’ measures for the Indian economy. The purpose of the “adjustment” was to facilitate India’s integration into the world economy. Still, no special attention was paid to education. Some critics of the new economic policy have expressed concern and anxiety about the consequences if governments step back from their primary roles and responsibilities in areas such as education and health. Drafted in 1986, the national education policy largely adhered to the established state-centred perspective) A major review in the early 1990s vaguely resonated the new discourse of liberalization, but offered little evidence of change in the basic perspective) The Programme of Action, announced in 1992, stopped short of admitting that the state’s role in education was about to change) It could hardly be imagined at that point that over the following decades, the state’s role in education would change so much that the Constitution would begin to sound like rhetoric.

To find out what happened, we have to distinguish between school and university. When Prime Minister P.V. Narasimha Rao spoke about liberalization as the central theme of the new economic policy, he also referred to the ‘structural adjustment programme’. Under this programme, the World Bank offered a ‘safety net’ for primary education. It meant additional resources and policy guidance to enable the system to expand its capacity for enrolling children. The District Primary Education Programme (DPEP), which later mutated into Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan (SSA), symbolised the ‘safety net’ approach. It was designed to cushion the harsh effects that ‘structural adjustment’ under liberalization was expected to cause in welfare sectors like children’s education and health. The DPEP and SSA efficiently served this role, creating an ethos in which children’s education seemed to have become a major priority of the state) The success of these programmes emboldened the government to push the Right to Education (RTE) law through Parliament. Governments of many States registered their anxiety over their capacity to fund the implementation of RTE after the Central assistance provided under SSA runs dry.

In higher education, the new economic policy designed on the principles of liberalization offered no safety net. From the beginning, the assumption was that higher education ought to generate its own resources. An accompanying idea was that higher education should respond to market demands in terms of knowledge and skills. Over the last three decades, these two guiding ideas have dented the established system of higher education in all parts of the country. Both Central and State universities have been starved of financial resources. Cutting down on permanent staff, both teaching and non-teaching, has emerged as the best strategy to cope with financial crunch. A complex set of outcomes, specific to different universities, makes any general analysis difficult. In some, self-financed courses, mostly vocational in nature, have provided a means of income) In others, such courses have been resisted by teacher unions. However, these unions have gradually lost their power and say because they are broken from within.