Emerging Trends in Higher Education

Chapter 11

* Emeritus Professor of Law, University of Warwick, UK.

1. I deploy the phrase regime of ‘educational services’ because a long while before the advent of the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS)—though for eminently different reasons—the Supreme Court of India declared ‘education’ as an ‘industry’. A hyper-globalizing India now fully reduces ‘education’ as servant and savant for the late, or if you should so wish, bleated regimes of global capitalism. The 1986 National Education Policy does not even hesitate in its insistence that in ‘the Indian way of thinking, a human being is a positive asset and a precious national resource which needs to be cherished, nurtured and developed with tenderness and care, coupled with dynamism’ ...