The Indian government’s education approach has been clumsy and unyielding; the focus of government in education was on building infrastructure with a little emphasis on teacher’s training, educational achievements and performance measurement. Education policies have funded schools and not schooling, this passage from Nandan Nilekani’s Imagining India, Ideas for a new Century, perhaps captures the current crisis in our classrooms. There is some reason for hope, public expenditure on education has seen a four fold increase in the eleventh five year plan, but the solution to solving this crisis is not political attention and funding, but liberalizing and de-control. So are we ready for voter-shared reforms in education, has the time come to go beyond hypocrisy?

Human Resources Development Minister Kapil Sibal said that the Right to Education Bill should be introduced in the Budget session and added that he planned to incentivise private sector investment into education. Sibal also said that the Ministry would reform current regulatory bodies and would push for a SEBI-like regulatory body for the education sector as well as ask for FDI to be invested into education.

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Here is verbatim transcript of a panel discussion with Kapil Sibbal; Harpal Singh the Chairman  CII Northern Region; Rajendra Pawar, Group Chairman, NIIT and Ved Prakash, the CEO, Milestone Group

Q: The recent attacks in Australia throw up the challenge and the supply demand mismatch; do you think the time has come to open up the education sector, to do away with the political reterict and hypocrisy?

Sibal: I entirely agree; if you are spending USD 20 billion by sending your children out, if you invest that money in the country, you can transform the entire education sector.

Q: How do you propose to do that because the right to education bill, we are hoping that it will come through in the budget session of the Parliament, are you saying it is a priority?

Sibal: Yes, that is a priority; and it will come through hopefully and many other things are going to happen and I will make an announcement very soon of my 100 day agenda and the five year agenda. But at the heart of it will be to open up the entire education sector, to greater investment and to allow children to go to the school that they want without any concern about where the money is going to come from because we will have to put in place a loan scheme, both in higher education and public education in government school is going to be free but even for private schools, if someone wants to go to a private school, he should be entitled to go as long as he gets a loan.

Q: On the issue of investment and expenditure, if one were to actually look at the outlays, they have gone up significantly from the 10 year plan to the 11^th year plan almost from 7.5% to 19% and perhaps the first time in India’s history that we are seeing this kind of money being pumped in, but its not just a question of money but its also a question of implementation and execution, how do you monitor and how do you make this accountable?

Sibal: We are actually doing it, over the last five years we have employed around 9 lakh teachers, lots of schools are being built, but the problem is that this is not something that can be done overnight, we have to have a long term solution and there are different issues at different levels, the primary and the secondary school issue, the higher education issue, teacher training issue, research issue, issue of skill development, issue of educational reforms across the board. So we need to first have a roadmap which is national and the fact that the Prime Minister over the years has increased expenditure in education allocation in the budget shows that this government means business.

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