ABSTRACT
The opening up of India's education sector, first to donor funding, then to international researchers, managerial and technical collaboration, and finally to public private partnerships since the 1990s, has brought into play a number of institutional interests, forces and debates from the international arena. Some of these debates and experiences have been useful in providing an impetus to a few elements of India's educational reform. However, the wide divergence between the socio-economic, cultural and institutional conditions of South Asia, many Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries and even China, has created a number of stark policy contradictions in India due to the unthinking application of processes and experiences from very different contexts. The recent Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) decision to relieve school teachers of the onerous task of setting question papers is indicative of the process of de-skilling them; substituting it with para-skilling.
