I.T For Rural Development

(This article was written by Naveen Muduru [ naveenmudunuru@yahoo.co.in], who was my student in CIT )

Definition

Webster’s Dictionary defines Information Technology as "the study of collection, retrieval, use, storage and communication of information using computers and microelectronic systems.” ‘Technology’ in the phrase “Information Technology” refers to the computers and microelectronic systems.

What is Information? This is nothing but data in any form. The very next question, which naturally comes to one’s mind, is ‘What all does Information Technology include?' This is one matter, which arises every now and then. If to follow the above definition, then electronic media also includes transmission of various information using microelectronic devices, but this definition is not being accepted by the industry. In my view, I think it is also a form of information technology. It is not only electronic media but I would like to say; every field, which comes under media, uses computers or a form of it for proper conveyance of message in one form or the other. Information Technology, on a whole, can be defined in one line as “usage of computer technology for processing of information.”

Technology And Society

As Marx once said, "key of humanity’s behavior is the mode of production." The relevance of technology to society depends on this. As per his theory, the economic systems that evolved are

· Primitive stage (semi-communist society)

· Slavery society

· Feudal society

· Capitalistic society

· Socialistic society

In my view, this philosophy of economic change is very much in relevance to human history. If we study these systems by a close look we can understand the role ‘technology’ has played to change the mode of production in the existing economic system. For example, the invention of steam engine can be regarded as the main reason behind the collapse of feudal system and transfer to capitalistic society.

It is necessary to understand these points very clearly to understand the link between the technology and society. Even Marx could not have classified the phase we are in now. The system that exists now is neo-capitalistic. The society is being ruled by globalization; the technology, which has brought about this change, is information technology.

It is this information technology that has brought about change, broken boundary barriers and reduced distance between nations. This technology has enormously increased the speed of mode of production.

In this context we have to study how much these developments had an impact on Indian society. No one can reject technology when it is revolutionizing the modes of production and is bringing a change in the complete day-to-day life. The arguments can be made only in regard to the useful implementation of technology in the society to improve the quality of the life of the majority of the population.

Rural India And Information Technology

Indian history reveals that its basic structure in terms of geography, economy, society, culture is entirely different from any other country in the world, let alone, they are of great variance from region to region within it’s boundary. Whenever a new system has to establish itself in the society, it has to overcome a lot of barriers. For this to be achieved there arises a necessity for one to study its structure extensively. Even though the whole world made a transitional shift of their economies from one system to the other, it did not happen so in India. The gradual industrial and technological growth could not break the feudal roots. The majority of Indian population still depends on agriculture as their basic source of livelihood. The Indian economy is a mixed economy and this exists for the sake of the enlistment of the underprivileged people of the society. Many of the major services in India remain under the public sector and these services cannot be made private so as to make them accessible to majority of the population. 75% of the population belongs to rural India. Unless and until this part of the population does not improve, substantial growth cannot be achieved. Information technology did no good for the improvement of this part of the population even after extensive steps were taken to do so.

What is the reason? Can we really achieve our goal of improvement of this part of the population with this technology and achieve substantial growth?

Conditions Prevailing In Rural India

Many states have laws about land ceiling, property rights, and redistribution of lands to landless peasants, equality of wages irrespective of gender, caste, creed and religion. Even after this 70% of the land is still in the hands of the landlords, who constitute only around 10-15% of the rural population. 30% of the land is still in the hands a middle class farmer who amount to 20% of the rural population. These may not match with the survey reports. But considering lands under rental basis, lands seized by rural moneylenders, amounts to these figures. 60-65% of total rural population is even now landless peasants or agricultural laborers. Majority of these men, women and children go to bed without anything in their stomach. Lack of proper political wills to implement laws is one of the reasons for their underdevelopment. No marketing of agricultural products (which is shattering the complete rural economy), leading to decrease in laborer wages, large-scale rural unemployment, natural disasters, lack of proper P.D.S (Public Distribution System) are the other reasons? In this context, the acceptance level towards technology will be very less. As Swami Vivekananda once said, "Empty stomachs can never accept knowledge. First fill their stomach then anything they are preached will have right impact." To achieve this, should be the goal of technology. Information technology can be used very effectively for substantial rural development, but it depends on the approach.

Rural population will accept technology if it brings improvement in their standard of living. If information technology increases their employment and gets rid of there social barriers then definitely it will get widespread acceptance and will play an active part in their development.

Information Technology For Rural Development

The 'technology as solution' approach ignores the social structure that determine both access as well as impact while cheapening technology and breaking social structure are crucial in determining their implementation beneficially. With all the hype about information technology is necessary to remind oneself that social structures influence both access as well as impact.

With respect to India, the categorization should be mainly based on the following:

· Geographical status: the people belonging to hilly regions, plains or dry lands.

· Economic status: whether they are landlords, marginal farmers or landless peasants.

· Social status: tribal settled in reserved areas, other tribal, davits, women, unemployed youth, students etc.

It is the breakage of these barriers, which are the only means of achieving development. The first and foremost as already said for achieving development is to break the obstacles put by social structures. For this to be achieved study of these barriers is necessary.

The people of hill forests supply us lot of natural resources like timber, food products etc. Their lack in knowledge regarding the property rights in the regions, on which they depend, is leading to their large-scale exploitation and suppression. They don’t even know who buys their products and how they are marketed. These are resulting in the under development both in terms of standards and production.

The ignorance of proper water management systems like watershed and various other projects made for the developments, lack of information regarding occurrence of natural calamities like floods are the major reasons for geographical diversities affecting the rural economy. Availability of water at the right time is one of the major requirements for checking crop failures. Along with this, increase in wet condition of the lands also lead to salinity of land leads to crop failure. The ever-changing environmental condition is one of the major confrontations to farmers along with frequent natural calamities. These are very few of the reasons resulting for frequent drought like situations and geographical variations.

The command of majority of agricultural lands by very few and over the other available land indirectly is one of the major reason behind the economical barriers. Establishment of strong feudal roots and the lack of scientific and political will, accounts to rigid social status, which are based on caste religion and gender. There are many laws made to destruct the evils of caste system. Reservations are made available in every field but majority of the people are still living in the dark.

There has been no change in there conditions especially in feudal dominated states like A.P, M.P, and Bihar. Dalits are regularly under attack in various forms. There, others take existence as an advantage for political and economical benefits. The basic amenity of right to equality was never achieved. No policy makers could change the position or status of women, who were betrayed of their right to equality for centuries.

They form the major labor force in agriculture (66% of total work in yielding a crop is done by women). They are paid many times lesser than (less than 50%) of what a male is paid.

Wages per day (in Rs.)

(Source: NSSO 1987)

In every field they have substantially increased their potential to compete with men but they could not break the male dominance. Their contribution to G.D.P is always been looked down upon. 70% of women working in unorganized sectors (which mainly constitutes of agricultural laborers and peasants) still live below poverty line and they never get the benefits of P.D.S. These are just few of the many conditions, which hamper the development of this country. It is technology that can break these barriers and empower each soul of the work force available in this country for its development. Information technology when properly implemented can bring a significant change.

The possibilities of usage of Information Technology vary distinctively to fulfill various gaps in the system. The first basic step to be made is to bring in technology to the doorstep of the poor man. So that it can be availed by every village as a unit. The technology must be available cheaply. This cheaper availability will make it accessible both by private and public investment. A policy framework must be made especially targeting rural India, on the same grounds as telephone facilities was made available. The targeted availability was to 5 kms. That is a telephone can be reached by traveling not more than five kilometers. In the same way gateway to information technology must be available in rural India within reach of every rural citizen. The government’s treasury may not allow it to do so, but the policy framework should show the resources for it through public investments. The available sources for this would be discussed in detail later. This is to be done on war foot basis. All these computers are to be handled over to community centers, and responsibility of these is to be handed over to socially discriminated people, which will result in the end of social evils. A comprehensive programme should be undertaken to train the local unemployed to work in these service centers to provide employment to two or three youths. The costs of salaries of these youths and other running costs can be met by utilizing these centers as service providers. The experience of M. S Swaminathan Research Foundation (MSSRF) ‘knowledge centers’ in villages that provide information about Government programmes has resulted in higher demand for access to these facilities from the poor. This demand can be seen in any part of India. This demand will in itself meet the running cost. These community services thus formed are to be networked or may be linked to NICNET (National Informatics Center Network), PSDN, INET (Indian Data Network) which are basically formed as government information networks. These networks connected central government to state government initially and have been extended to district and taluk Headquarters lately. This extension is to be further extended to the village community centers. This may take a little longer time. The promotion of culture of electronic mailing is only one aspect of networking, but the immediate necessity is to setup basic equipment to get access to anyone of the thousands of databases available. This can be done by basic dial-up connection using a telephone line.

One sits in front of the PC and connects him to a telephone line using a modem and ends up with a Database at his service. Anyone who can read text and can key in information (with some basic training) can do this job. All these PC’s using telephone networks can be switched over to data networks, which is more cost effective. INET can surely fulfill this purpose in the years to come. All these individual community centers can be grouped and provided with jobs like data entry (which has become potential employment provider for urban youth) in the industry. This will definitely solve the problem of long time running cost of these community centers.

The data base gateways are provided at the village level. The youth have already been trained in accessing the databases, what’s next? What are these community centers going to do? The answer lies here "they are going to provide services to public under community center preview." This service will result in conveying information to the rural population. This information being conveyed will bring in transparency in governance to a large extent. This transparency may not change the standards directly but will bring to their doorsteps the resources for development, for example the computerization of land records in A.P will not get the landless peasants the land which is rightfully theirs but gives them knowledge about the possibilities they have to change there lives.

The I.T can be used to break the barriers, which were discussed earlier, very effectively. Remote sensing technology, which is extensively developed in India using the latest satellites under Indian Space Research Programme, can help a lot in removing the geographical barriers. Information like:

o Bringing additional land under cultivation

o Integrated pest management etc.

Together with reliable information on:

o Existing land use and acreage under various crops

o Soil types and extent of problem soils

o Monitoring of surface and underground water sources

o Agro meteorological forecasting

Will enable formation of appropriate development strategies to sustain the pace of agricultural development.

This information when supplied to the database and made available extensively can effectively change the lives of people living in the dry lands. 13 categories of wasteland amounting to 54 million hectares have been identified, and at least 50% of this can be brought under cultivation. Detailed surveys through remote sensing have been found to considerably narrow down the areas for ground water exploration. Based on statistics 1,70,000 bore wells were dug with the help of remote sensing. This has improved water exploration by 92%. This information, regarding underground water sources when added to other watershed management programmes (like data regarding possibilities of check dams, tanks and other surface water management programmes) can result in a comprehensive water management programme at local levels. Along with the land management, the remote sensing technology explores availability of sea resources and related industries. When this is made available on a database, it is of great help to increase the productivity and also to reduce disasters during natural calamities (using information from weather forecasting). These data components are to be made available at a unit level. The involvement of community is very important for proper implementation, because lot of factors depend on local experiences which computers or even humans who do not have any contact with the specified area will not be able to solve completely.

To remove the economical barriers the only way is by widespread distribution of surplus land and sincere implementation of land reforms. This will solve maximum number of problems which hamper development like literacy, unemployment, population growth etc. directly or indirectly. Research reveals that if land reforms are sincerely implemented by overcoming the loopholes in the law, industrial growth of 4 - 5 times can be achieved within no time. Studies in India have shown that reforms and literacy are interrelated. Despite limited land reforms, a comparison of neighboring states like, West Bengal and Bihar; Kerala and Tamil Nadu shows that superior literacy status was achieved in states were land reforms were implemented successfully. IT should be extensively used in mobilization of public opinion in this regard. While mobilization must necessarily have a local character, there are wider dimensions to the process of support and formation of solidarity opinion in civil society. The above conditions when met will increase the nations economy on whole.

There is one more important social barrier: The tribal people living in reserved areas are the natural owners to the forests in which they live, but are by large exploited by land mafias and landlords from nearby areas. These people are to be well educated about their rights, which were recognized at large and made into laws. Dalits have also been considerably under suppression for years. Apart from educating them about their rights and laws, which protect them from social boycott, steps are to be taken for community realisation. Establishment of community centers and taking up its activities in dalit colonies can bring about a major change, which will surely make people realize their inhuman nature.

Women participation plays a major role in agriculture, but is always living in adverse conditions. They were always betrayed of their rights, the very right of equality. There is a necessity to make them realize their rights. They are completely ignorant of various laws made to make them more economically and socially stable.

Bringing the database very close to rural population and making them a part of it will definitely make them realize their social and economical backwardness. If proper steps are taken to meet these requirements, then definitely they will use IT for exploration of resources to increase their productivity and marketing for them.

Information about market conditions for crops, enhances the ‘agency’ of those who produce it more than merely depending on the middleman. The middleman exploitation of farmers preventing them from getting proper price for their produce will no longer be possible. The women self-helped groups formed under various governmental schemes can enhance the productivity and marketing of their produce (mainly cottage industry).

The World Bank in 1989 gave the following recommendations for development of rural women:

· Provision of direct access to institutional credit (through DWCRA, IRDP etc.)

· Orientation and operation modification in the agricultural extension systems.

· Promotion of direct membership in viable produce cooperatives and

· Organization of women into groups that provide them a legitimate forum beyond the private domestic sphere and a more audible voice in demanding services.

Even though various governments are nowadays giving much hype about achieving these goals, the ground reality is that, the actual development is very minute. IT extensively provides the source for these women to know the complete aspects, from formation of self-helped groups to marketing, and then definitely these goals can be achieved.

Conclusion:

We can now take up the question: what is needed to increase access the necessary information and knowledge? One answer to this question is: reduce the cost of the equipment and change the regulatory system so as to make smaller investments possible. Wireless solutions, for instance, can overcome some of the problems of high fixed cost associated with wired systems.

As shown by the MSSRF ‘knowledge villages’ IT centers can be developed as common property resources for villages. One more important aspect that can be done for generating funds for initial establishment is assigning service center management and establishment to anyone of the many women self-helped groups formed in that village. This will empower them as they have direct access to information and technological guidance. This can also be done by diverting the funds from Rojgar Yojana’s made to employ youth groups.

To conclude the effects of implementation of IT could:

· Increase price realization of farmers and other rural producers at village level.

· Increase the productivity of those who own productive resources by spreading innovations beyond local confines and to the illiterate too.

· Increase the income and social status of IT operators

· Improve extension and education

· Enable community based organization to promote tourism and other income generating activities

· Be useful in demanding access to government programs and transparency of government expenditure

· Aid but not substitute for the process of mobilization of the landless, include women for land and other productive resources.

As Marx said "it is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence but, on the contrary their social existence determines their consciousness." It is this social existence that has to be enhanced by technology to realize their consciousness for the development of the system, which is the basis for development.

REFERENCES:

1. Unorganized women labour of India
2. ICT’s in rural poverty alleviation by D.N: Economical and political weekly (March 17, 2001)
3. Directory Of Rural Technologies: National Institute Of Rural Development
4. Text Book Of Political Thought

Do you know how to turn a thin line into a broad line? You go up or down an equal distance from the ends of the thin line and then connect the four points. You probably learned this technique for turning a line into a rectangle in your high school, and, doubtless, you believe it was devised by Euclid or some such 3,000-year-old thinker. If you try to implement the same on Computer, beware! You may be sued by IBM, because this is their notorious "fat lines" patent. ¹

Are you planning to go the e-education way? Do you want to “administer tests, lessons, assessments, and surveys on the Internet, scoring them, and maintaining records of test scores online”? Sorry, you cannot do this. This is patented by Test.com. ²

Have you designed a good user interface for your program? Do you think displaying icons on screens is a good idea? Think again. This is patented by Microsoft. ³

Thinking of an innovative way of printing - Can it be any different from “A printer responds to channel commands including coded data received over a channel from a data processing unit by printing characters represented by the coded data using an electro photographic printing arrangement”? It should be, for this is patented by IBM. ⁴

Do you think “providing a user interface control to modify properties of items within a main application window “ should include “a main application window, a gallery control window, a control object selection processing module, and a control object focus processing module”? Sorry, this is again patented by whom else, but Microsoft. ⁵

Are you a gaming enthusiast? Do you want to develop “Real-time multi-player online games”? Not surprisingly, you cannot do this also. This is patented by Sheldon F Goldberg.⁶

Introduction to software patents

Patents were introduced to protect truly novel software ideas from unfair exploitation, while releasing the knowledge itself to the community. Patents are granted to “implementation of ideas” and not on “ideas”. The patents are issued in response to an application by the inventor for 20 years. In the case of software, the distinction between idea and its implementation is not clear. So invariably, a basic concept like data structures and algorithms also gets patented. Since there is no way an algorithm is patented, it is done under the pretext of some “apparatus and method”. Software that has been patented includes - system software and various types of application software, including business software, user-interactive software and expert system software. In general, the functional aspects of software have been patented. Examples include processes, editing and control functions, compiling and operating system techniques and the like. With respect to design patents, icons and electronic font types have been patented. According to United States Patent and Trademark office, ⁷ today 24,326 patents are issued related to computer software.

Problems with software patents

People developing systems have new ideas from time to time. Naturally they use these ideas. But, the patent system makes them ask, for each design decision, "Will we get sued?” This patent system impedes development. With less development, programmers will have fewer ideas along the way. So, patents actually hamper the software development process.

Industry majors echo this idea. Robert Barr, IPR department of CISCO ⁸ says “My observation is that patents have not been a positive force in stimulating innovation at Cisco”. At the USPTO hearings of 1994, Adobe's representative said ⁹ “I believe that software per se should not be allowed patent protection”. Oracle submitted the following statement to the hearings on software patentability at the US Patent Office in 1994 ¹⁰ “Oracle Corporation opposes the patentability of software”.

On the other hand, some companies are acquiring patents in a big way. Microsoft has 3632 patents and IBM has 540. Does this translate into greater development of software and bring benefits to development community and general public? No, patents are used by industry majors to harass small time development companies. Bill Gates once said ¹¹ “…. (We should) patent as much as we can. A future startup with no patents of its own will be forced to pay whatever price the giants choose to impose. That price might be high. Established companies have an interest in excluding future competitors”. As an example hear from Avery Lee, author of VirtualDub, a free software tool for converting multimedia file formats. He was informed by Microsoft that it had intellectual property rights on the ASF format. They told him that, the implementation was illegal since it infringed on Microsoft patents. Lee says he removed support for ASF in his software, since he could not risk a legal confrontation.¹²

The most dramatic case of software patent has been the “LZW algorithm” patent held by Unisys. They announced that users of the GIF image format must register and pay a royalty or face lawsuits for their past usage. The royalty list prepared by Unisys was - 0.45% royalty on the total unit selling price of GIF/LZW products (minimum $0.10, maximum $10.00 per unit) and a 0.65% royalty on GIF/TIFF/LZW products (minimum $0.20, maximum $25.00). This triggered a wide range of protest from all quarters and was probably the first time where there was so much public outcry against software patent. There was a proposal to "burn all GIF’s" and replace them with a format such as PNG. But, that was not completely possible, because PNG does not support animation, which is widely used with GIF. Finally, this patent ended on June 20, 2004 not before brining the issue to center stage. ¹³

India and software patents

The Indian Patents Act, 1970 does not recognize patent protection for computer program. The only mechanism of protection for computer program and computer data is under section 2(o) of the Copyright Act of 1957 which recognizes computer program and computer data as creative work entitled to copyright protection. The patent act was amended first on March 26, 1999. Indian Patents Act (Amendment) Act of 2002, created an explicit exclusion (Art 3(k)) that a "computer program per se" should not be considered an invention.

The Indian Patent Office's “Manual of Patent Practice and Procedure, July 2001” clearly stated that ¹⁴ - “Computer program is not patentable invention as computer program is a set of instructions for controlling a sequence of operations of a data processing system. It closely resembles a mathematical method. It may be expressed in various forms e.g. a series of verbal statements, a flow chart, an algorithm, or other coded form and may be presented in a format suitable for direct entry into a particular computer, or may require transcription into a different format (or computer “language”). It may merely be written on paper or recorded on some machine readable medium such as magnetic tape or disc or optically scanned record, or it may be permanently recorded in a control store forming part of a computer. Thus it is evident that a program may be presented in terms of either software or firmware.”

New era of software patent in India

On December 27, 2004 India's Minister of Industry Mr. Kamal Nath issued an ordinance ¹⁵ (a law that doesn't need parliamentary approval) in order to greatly expand the patent system. Under the new Patents (Amendment) Ordinance 2004, the clause relating to software patent would be modified to "a computer program per se other than its technical application to industry or a combination with hardware". This means that any embedded software can be patented now in India. Since all major software has a technical industrial application even they can be patented.

The amendment was introduced to comply with TRIPS agreement (27(1): Patentable Subject Matter) which reads – “Patents shall be available for any inventions, whether products or processes, in all fields of technology, provided that they are new, involve an inventive step and are capable of industrial application. Patents shall be available and patent rights enjoyable without discrimination as to the place of invention, the field of technology and whether products are imported or locally produced. It should be noted that the text explicitly encourages differing interpretations of some of the abstract terms used therein, such as non-obviousness and industrial application".

Conclusion

The important law regarding software patents was changed without a proper discussion in the parliament. The evil effects of having software patent is already described in early sections. We will witness all those and more in coming days in India. No more are the developers free to write the software they want. Though it is claimed that patent law will benefit the entire software industry, the US and EU experiences have proved otherwise. Countries having this draconian law have witnessed the slow death of individual dedicated software developers in the hands of software giants. India, which is aiming to move up in the quality pyramid of software world by creating world class products, does not need this law.

The present amendment to the patent law has long term negative effects on Indian software world. It does not serve the purpose it intends to. So as Richard Stallman says – “In some cases, when (a law) doesn't serve any purpose except to create artificial monopolies so that somebody can interfere with software development, squeeze money out of developers and users, then we should reject it”.

¹ http://www.forbes.com/asap/2002/0624/044.html

² US Patent No 6513042 ³ US Patent No D496943 ⁴ US Patent No 4031519

⁵ US Patent No 6826729 ⁶ US Patent No 5823879

⁷ http://www.uspto.gov/patft/index.html

⁸ http://swpat.ffii.org/papers/cisco/index.en.html

⁹ http://www.base.com/software-patents/statements/adobe.testimony.html

¹⁰ http://www.base.com/software-patents/statements/oracle.html

¹¹ http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/policy/2002/08/15/lessig.html?page=2

¹² http://www.advogato.org/article/101.html

¹³ http://cloanto.com/users/mcb/19950127giflzw.html

¹⁴ http://www.patentoffice.nic.in/ipr/patent/manual.htm

¹⁵ http://www.patentoffice.nic.in/ipr/patent/ordinance_2004.pdf

After opening up various sectors like banking, insurance and communication to Multi National Companies, the Indian Government has decided to open up the education sector for them. Finally, globalisation and commercialisation of education is becoming a reality. General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS), which came into force in 1996, provides legal rights to trade in all services except those taken care of entirely by the government. Education is one of the 12 services included in the list of activities binding member countries to allow market access and to remove restrictions in the path. India being a signatory to the WTO should be very much cautious about the functioning of the foreign educational institutions.

At the advent of India’s independence, there were 19 universities and 591 colleges while students enrolment at the tertiary level of education was 0.2 million. Now, the number of universities, deemed universities and institutions of national importance has risen to 261. The number of degree and above level general education colleges have grown to 8,361. The number of professional colleges is 2,340 and total enrolment is 8.8 million. This certainly is a great advancement. But the share of higher education in the union budget’s total provision for education has fallen from 28.19 per cent in 1990-91 to 17.7 per cent in 2003-04. Further, allocation for education in the first five-year plan was 7.2 per cent of the total outlay. In the tenth five-year plan, it has come down to 2.9 per cent.

International education definitely has advantages like - Regularly updated curricula are made available to the student. It is more practical, learner-centric and develops marketable skills. A large number of options in multi-disciplinary integrated disciplines with high degree of employability in industry become available. But, at present 150 foreign universities (50 from UK, 45 from Australia, 30 from USA and the rest from Canada and other European countries) that have been operating in India. But, hardly any top ranking university of the USA, the UK, Australia or New Zealand has shown interest in India. Only those universities with very low rankings in their own country and those which are badly in need of foreign students have made inroads into developing countries like India. It is estimated that out of the 50 foreign universities competing to woo Indian students, none have a good standing in their own education system. Since there is a lack of policy framework that can look into the credentials of Universities coming to India, they are allowed to operate in India.

The prime minister’s Council on Trade and Industry (PMCTI) constituted a ‘special subject group on policy framework for private investment in education, health and rural development’. The Government found no experts in the concerned areas but the noted industrialists, Mukesh Ambani (Convenor) and Kumarmangalam Birla (Member) to constitute this special subject group. Obviously, they were among the best-interested people to suggest the implementation of the World Bank prescriptions and privatization and commercialization of higher education in the country. Ambani and Birla submitted their report ‘A Policy Framework for Reforms in Education’ to the PMCTI on April 24, 2000. They recommend, "Governments must encourage private financing by taking on some of the risks that makes financial institutions reluctant to lend for higher education."

The GATS calls for drastic cuts in public expenditure on education. Accordingly, the committee in its report recommended that "there should be a freeze on recruitment of staff in all the autonomous organisations at all levels. In addition, an ad-hoc cut of 10 per cent in the total staff strength should be imposed in all these institutions” (pages 7 and 26, part III). Following this, the University Grants Commission (UGC) issued a directive that only 80 per cent of the teaching vacancies will be filled up and that too on a temporary basis. This clearly demonstrates that GATS does not have any interest in improving the quality of education. They are only interested in exploiting the lucrative market.

The present Indian education system has many drawbacks. Our syllabus is not international in nature and not upgraded to present needs. Infrastructure in a majority of our institutions is very poor. Our education policies are decided by political affiliations of ruling party and not by academicians who have global exposure. There is a need for introspection in this regard. Government should think of improving these areas rather than implementing GATS. Had the Government focussed more on higher education, we could have resisted GATS. But, the private sector’s contribution in higher education in India is gaining in strength. So, India cannot take recourse to article 1.3 of the GATS that allows exemption for services provided by the government.