A hundred days is all. Listen to the call of the pundits and the clamour of corporations: the economy was liberalised more than eighteen years ago, now it is time to ‘liberalise’ minds.

But the truth is that education is never neutral terrain. Governments and power lobbies may try to look innocent, but they always have agendas when it comes to educational reform. Education makes knowledge a weapon of power. It uses it to reproduce the existing order, to manufacture consent, to keep those on the margins perpetually excluded. This is why Macaulay’s famous minute is so central to the way we study colonial rule in India. This is why, not so long ago, the Sangh Parivar was bulldozing its way through an entire range of educational and cultural institutions. And now here is the UPA in its new avatar, promising us educational ‘reform’ as neoliberal economists declaim that Manmohan Singh should “set our campuses free”. Clearly, the regime needs not only participants but also defenders.

These new initiatives of the UPA need to be seen not in a fragmentary manner, but as part and parcel of an overall agenda. The HRD Minister has recently proclaimed that Std.X exams will be made optional, and that the recommendations of the ‘Committee to Advise on Renovation and Rejuvenation of Higher Education in India’ headed by the much-respected educationist Prof. Yashpal, will be his Bible. These declarations have been hailed widely as ‘revolutionary’. We need to read between the lines more closely.

Will the move to make the Std. X exams optional reduce stress and pressure on children? Educational and exam reform are no doubt called for: the spectre of students committing suicide due to bad marks haunts us. But removing the board exams is like touching the tip of an iceberg and going no further. Even making these exams ‘optional’ will lead to an increase in the divides in society: what will be the status of students from less fortunate backgrounds who by not doing this exam will be underrated by society? The stress caused by the board exams has a lot to do with the fact that opportunities for higher education and employment are so few and highly contested. So long as opportunities remain limited, and exams exist as a mode of elimination rather than evaluation, students will continue to feel stressed wondering whether they will make it to college or a good job.

The Yashpal Committee Report (henceforth YCR) has much in it that deserves praise. It emphasises the inter-disciplinary character of University education, a holistic, humanist vision of the University, and the organic link between University and society. It speaks out against the rapidly expanding trend of private engineering and management colleges that have reduced education to a business. It criticizes rote learning and speaks of the need for curricular reform. The YCR also described how the “Indian system of higher education has kept itself aloof from the local knowledge base of the worker, the artisan and the peasant.” (p.13)

The YCR states that one of its key concerns is upholding the autonomy of universities so as to ensure freedom in research and training. (p.9).This is indeed a laudable principle, especially insofar as it calls for academic freedom and self-evaluation and self-reform in Universities. It also recognises that funding to universities has become “inadequate, irregular and inflexible.” Yet it prescribes, not a quantum increase in Government funding but rather a regimen where the University must solicit private funds to ‘supplement’ public funding. For instance, it recommends that Universities must develop an “ability to attract partnership from the private sector.” (p 38) It states that the role of a VC must extend beyond the academic realm to financial prowess too. It recommends that the Universities hire ‘professional fund raisers’ who will highlight the University’s ‘USP’ to attract funding. All this is but a short step to tailoring the academic curriculum to suit the market and letting corporates take over campus spaces, thus fencing off many of the university’s resources from its own students and teachers. The dependence on professional fund raisers and the inevitable preoccupation with ‘selling’ itself is compatible neither with the social responsibilities nor with the academic autonomy of the university as outlined by the YCR itself.

The issue is not of blind opposition to any private investment in education. The YCR does not openly advocate the withdrawal of the State from its responsibility to fund education, rather it says the “State cannot walk away from” education (p 41). But in the same breath it talks of Public Private Partnerships (PPP) in education (p 34). The real issue is: At whose doorstep lies the primary responsibility for funding higher education lie? This is the test where the YCR fails us. It speaks as though private and public responsibility for education are mutual and equal. It does not spell out how ‘Govt responsibility’ is defined and it makes no recommendations of how much govt. spending should be allocated towards education.

How can a university be both a center of free thought, uphold humanist values and pander to corporate interests? There is a certain ambiguity to this definition of autonomy. How is it possible to be both the “trustee of humanist traditions’ and a slave to the market? How is “the principle of moral and intellectual autonomy from political authority and economic power” to be upheld by a university if its resources are determined by how well it panders to these interests?

‘PPP’ is being justified in the name of correcting the “undersupply” in higher education: but can the private sector really meet the needs of the mass of India’s students? The example of other countries suggests not. In most cases, the higher the share of private universities in higher education, the lower the share in enrolment. In China, for instance, private institutes constitute 39.1% of higher education institutions, but a mere 8.9% students study in them. In the US, private universities constitute 80% of higher educational institutions, but they account only for 42.8% of total enrolments in the country. By contrast, public sector institutions in the US constitute just 19.6% of total higher education institutions, but they account for 57.3% of enrolments.

The YCR describes the rampant corruption and commercialisation in private institutions. But when it comes to a “credible corrective mechanism,” all it can suggest is that family members of investors should not hold administrative posts. It says private institutions ‘should’ not have a ‘sole motive of profit’ and ‘should’ not confine themselves only to ‘commercially viable’ sectors. The question is, if profit remains one of the motives, how can the institution avoid ills like steep fees, capitation fees etc.? The YCR seems to have no idea of the structural logic of private capital and private profit. Mistakenly locating the profiteering motive in ‘family’ greed, it fails to see that private capital inevitably has a profit motive that militates against the humanist vision of university.

The question of fees is a central one. Time and again, in the context of both private and govt institutions, YCR repeats that “No student should be turned away …for want of funds for education.” And it says “primary focus” should be “on making education affordable.” (p 38-39) Yet, the YCR does not recommend public funding and low fees: instead it repeats that old euphemism for ‘fee hike’ – ‘differential fee structure’ (high fees for those who can afford it and scholarships, educational loans for those who can’t). The National Knowledge Commission (NKC) too recommends a differential fee structure. Such a measure cannot cater to poor students; it is nothing but a pretext to make high fees the norm, while virtuously denying the agenda of commercialisation. The best way of making education accessible to the poor is to provide education at a very low cost. If we want to avoid subsidising the rich, the best way is not through increasing fees, but through taxes: through an educational cess on people in a certain salary bracket, and an even larger cess on industry. High fees, ‘for those who can pay’ means privatization by the back door: the govt is sure to decree that all but the very poorest, ‘can pay’!

The YCR points out that the best Universities are rooted in their social milieu and good foreign universities may not be transplantable. But he contradicts himself by recommending that the “top 200” foreign institutions be welcomed in India. The NKC also similarly recommends “incentive” for “good” foreign institutions and disincentive for sub-standard ones. Both YCR and the NKC evade the point that “incentives” for the “good” institutions are likely to mean that they poach on our public resources and existing institutions, rather their investing their own academic assets and resources here.

In consonance with the YCR and NKC recommendations, the govt. is considering doing away with regulatory bodies like the UGC, the AICTE, the MCI and so on. In their place, it will establish a single, ‘independent’ regulator. The YCR states that its conception of a single regulator has a different rationale than that offered by the NKC. At first glance this is true: the YCR’s main argument for this recommendation is that University education should not be cubicalised or fragmented. But one fails to see how such an ‘independent’ regulator will be held accountable to the humanist vision of University as outlined by the YCR. The danger is that such a regulator will be free from checks and balances, accountable and answerable to none, with less need to respond to protest mobilisations from the students or teachers.

Interestingly, both YCR and NKC propose that the single regulator comprise of seven members. The NKC says all seven must be distinguished academics; the YCR says five of them must be academics, while one must have a background of social engagement while another must represent industry. The idea of corporates having a say in education policy has thus made an entry – not through the NKC which was widely perceived as having a neoliberal agenda, but through the YCR which commands greater acceptability.

The last couple of decades of anti-privatisation movement by students have achieved a political victory, in that Governments are now reluctant to peddle privatisation openly. They try to coat the bitter pill in soothing and sweet slogans of ‘reform.’ The YCR’s tone and tenor appear, on the face of it, very different from that adopted by the NKC. But when it comes to the actual recommendations – on fees, on private investment, on PPP, on ‘independent regulatory body’ – the YCR and the NKC both favour similar policies that are euphemisms for continued and intensified privatisation of education. Exposing and challenging this agenda must be a priority for the student movement.