ABSTRACT
From the mid-nineteenth century onwards, industrialising nations placed the responsibility for providing education on modern states to fulfil the technological requirements of capital for a better-educated labour force freed from the bondage of landlord–serf relations. For countries like India, the attempt to leap-frog over the democratising phase of capitalist development, with its concomitant increased employment and mass provisioning of essential social services and to adopt the contemporary phase of neoliberal jobless growth and privatisation/corporatisation of all essential services with user-paid principles of efficiency has resulted in a massive exclusion of those who simply cannot afford to pay. It constitutes a qualitatively distinct form of the intensification of exploitation and deprivation suffered by a people already subjected to pre-capitalist forms of oppression. The chapter seeks to analyse this fundamentally contemporary sense of exclusion in the Indian context that endangers the democratic unity of society itself.
