The inevitable is happening. As World Trade Organisation negotiations on a General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS) get going, developing countries like India and Pakistan are coming under growing pressure to open up higher education to foreign educational institutions (FEIs). Equally inevitably, the pressure is supplemented from within by politicians and bureaucrats sold on facilitating a new form of colonisation of our universities and other institutions of higher learning.

In India’s case, the commerce ministry, headed by Kamal Nath, and backed by Planning Commission Deputy Chairman Montek Singh Ahluwalia, has emerged as the main proponent of unfettered foreign direct investment (FDI) in higher education. Nath’s Ministry has made a strong pitch for this in a “consultation paper”.

Remarkably, the plea for effecting such a major change in the prime source of India’s most skilled and intellectual personpower is exogenous, or driven by external circumstances, rather than by an endogenous consideration of how the country should improve its universities, develop human resources, and emerge as a leader—not just in science and technology, but in the world of ideas.

The paper’s argument for allowing of foreign capital into higher education is inspired by a narrow view of India’s participation in WTO talks on Agreement on Trade in Services. India should never have agreed in the first place to negotiate GATS and accept the perverse re-definition of drinking water and knowledge as mere “services”, trade in which should be opened up—putting commercial interests above all else.

Nothing could have been a more eloquent testimony to the subjugation of India’s developmental objectives to multinational capital.

The core of the commerce Ministry’s argument consists of four propositions, two of them unexceptionable and two obnoxious. The paper concedes that education is a public good crucial to human capital creation, itself a key determinant of progress.

The second acceptable proposition is that India has /not/ invested adequately in higher education. Only 11 percent of those in the relevant age-group (17 to 23) are enrolled in universities—a proportion that’s low, not just in relation to the developed countries (50 to 80 percent), but even Brazil (18 percent), the Philippines (31 percent) or Malaysia (29).

So far so good. Now come the two bad propositions crucial to the carte-blanche-for-FDI. The paper holds that higher education in India largely benefits the elite and hence is a private good. Indeed, “private funding… is not only more efficient, but also more equitable.”

There’s a problem of access in India’s unequal and hierarchical society. Very few people have the luxury of going into tertiary education. Indeed, only one-third of those who enter school complete secondary education. But this mandates improving access through more subsidies, scholarships, and courses that combine learning and earning, etc.—not for further reducing access. India needs greater public funding of higher education.

India currently spends only 0.37 percent of its GDP on it, three times lower than the proportion in the developed countries. Private investment in education is a recipe for further contraction of access.

The second argument is worse: foreign investment is all that’s needed to improve matters in India. Hence we should allow FDI into higher education, like the Dominican Republic, Brazil and Singapore. This ignores the issue of content of education, and reduces it to a profit-guaranteeing venture. But higher education is about generating knowledge, encouraging critical thinking and imparting skills relevant to social needs.

Education is a highly nation-specific activity, determined by national cultures and priorities. The Euro has economically integrated 16 countries, including Germany, France and Italy. But their education systems are as varied as their languages.

A German learns engineering through a different sequence of steps from a Frenchwoman. And the way Italy designs its courses to suit the needs of state recruitment is different from the way in which vocational education is organised by its neighbours.

India has a huge, creaking, poorly managed higher education system, with 348 universities, 17,625 colleges and 10.5 million students. There’s very little quality control, especially over the 63 unaided “deemed universities”, 7,650 unaided private colleges and 150 foreign education institutions (FEIs). Although the private colleges have over 3.1 million students, they duck government regulation, for instance, in respect of caste reservations.

The growth of India’s higher educational institutions has been spectacular. Universities have doubled in number since 1990-91, and enrolment has more than doubled—at the expense of quality, increased rigidity in course design, poor absorption of knowledge, and growing lack of access to laboratory facilities and journals.

Indian universities are in a mess. Their average graduate compares poorly with her/his counterpart in most countries, including many developing ones. The so-called elite institutions are extremely selective and well-funded, but pose the problem of relevance and talent drain. Most IIT graduates go abroad or end up selling soap.

This calls for reform, administrative changes, more funding, greater flexibility, quality improvement, etc. But this task won’t be remotely addressed by the entry of foreign universities.

A National Institute of Educational Planning and Administration study of 131 FEIs says the only two of them run full-time courses in India; the rest offer “twinning” programmes to attract students to the host country. “Twinning” is a cheap option. A part of the programme is undertaken in the host country and the rest at the foreign destination. This is an open invitation to fly-by-night operators.

India’s Ministry of Human Resource Development appointed a committee under eminent scientist CNR Rao to go into the issue. The committee wisely suggested that FEIs should only be allowed under regulation, for a limited period followed by review, on payment of a substantial security deposit, no repatriation of surpluses, etc.

FEIs must be accredited in the home country, and must offer courses on a par with those taught there. They must accept Indian regulation on quotas, fees, etc. and agree not to poach faculty. They should be allowed on a strictly reciprocal basis.

Nath and Ahluwalia are mounting pressure to drop all these cautionary principles. But their proposal would violate the spirit of all the consultations held since January 2005 with different agencies, including the states. It also goes against the principle of non-discriminatory treatment. It’ll encourage profiteering in education and will turn India into a passive recipient of foreign educational services.

No university of excellence like Harvard, Cambridge, Oxford or Princeton is likely to set up shop in India. We’ll be loaded with ‘B’ and ‘C’ grade universities. This will only increase the existing resource drain caused by the 140,000 Indians who go abroad to study every year. The drain is the equivalent of what it would take to set up, say, 10 JNUs or 15 to 20 IITs.

If India is ever to emerge as a knowledge power, it cannot dispense with self-reliance in higher education. Self-reliance doesn’t mean autarky: India must encourage interaction and collaboration with good foreign universities. But that has nothing to do with hawking its students as grist to the FEIs’ “degree mills”. India and Pakistan still have a long way to go in reforming their higher education institutions. But FDI is no shortcut to this task.

Copyright 2006 The News International