ABSTRACT
Sukanta Chaudhuri takes a close look at policy-directions and their underlying implications for the Indian public education sector. Through a calculated impoverishment of government-run primary and secondary schooling, accompanied by an insidious entrepreneurialism of ‘lower’ skill-training, the vision of current-day educational planning aims at a re-entrenchment of class, caste, gender and communal hierarchies. The essay reviews palpable trends within the primary and tertiary education sectors, through detailed analyses of recent budgetary allocations and expenditures for schooling schemes vis-a-vis state, central or ‘world-class’ universities. What is alarmingly betrayed by the unravelling of this data is a politics of ‘planned underdevelopment’ that seeks to structurally exclude the bulk of the nation’s youth from both access to and benefits of public-funded higher education.
