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 anti-people 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 13th 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. These developments are nothing to be surprised at because they are part of the global campaign of the neoliberal capital. In countries such as UK, the neoliberal campaign began with the Margret Thatcher regime (Regan, 2007), destroying the remnants of welfarism. Though the large scale process of state withdrawal began across continents during the neoliberal regime from early 1980s, the pre-neoliberal regimes were not socialist regimes but were rather representing the particular epochs of capitalism in those countries, whether UK (Cole, 2008) or India (Kumar, 2006b). It is important, therefore, to understand the education policies in conjunction with the trajectory and stages of development of capital in a country. In this article, the author talks about neoliberalism and the neoliberal assault on education in India. He contends that the impact of neoliberalism on education in particular and society as a whole affects masses in worst possible manner in India. (Contains 1 table and 7 notes. Contains a bibliography.)