India's response to GATS

The National Knowledge Commission, the advisory body to the Prime Minister of India, aims to transform India into a knowledge society. Advisors recommend expanding access to higher education and improving the quality of learning through the Five-Year Plan for 2007 to 2012. This will use funds increased by ten times (to US$300 billion) from the previous plan to reach a target enrolment of 21 million by 2012. One important strategy to transforming higher education is through promoting privatisation.

This transformation, however, requires structural change for programmes, institutions and students to move across nations. The General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS) is a treaty of the World Trade Organization designed to extend international trade in services, among them higher education. Trade in higher education would include aspects such as distance learning, recruiting international students, establishing university campuses abroad and movement of professionals.

Delivering international collaborative programmes in higher education began in the 1990s. At present around 150 Indian institutes are collaborating with foreign universities and awarding foreign degrees. Most however, are private institutes and not recognised by the University Grants Commission, therefore are not able to award valid degrees. There are very few partnerships with public universities and colleges, despite the high demand for foreign higher education in India. Recognition and accreditation are two important regulatory issues in sustainable collaborative delivery of programmes.

Trade within the GATS framework has so far not begun, as it has to be followed by further negotiations and agreement of the terms on which the trade will take place. The pace of negotiations has slowed due to failure in talks on other issues such as subsidy in agriculture. India has offered the following commitments:

Cross border supply (mode 1)
Any foreign institute can provide education through distance learning, in print or online. However, they will have to follow the regulations of the Distance Education Council.

Consumption abroad (mode 2)
Indian students can go abroad freely for higher education and the government will place no restrictions on them.

Commercial presence of foreign service providers (mode 3)
As education is a non-profit activity in India, fees charged by the foreign service providers will be regulated.

Presence of natural persons (mode 4)
There will be conditions relating to the type of professionals, purpose of visits abroad and visa relaxation.

There were contentious issues in negotiations over developed countries' demand to include training and testing services under education, mutual recognition of degrees, barriers in terms of economic needs test and so on.

In response to GATS negotiations, the government is planning to bring in legislation that will allow foreign universities to grant degrees under regulatory control, as applicable to the Indian universities. Academic groups in India are divided over the consequences of trade in higher education. They fear that it will promote commodification and will become unaffordable for most students. Public universities in India may also change because of commercialisation. Some experts see an advantage in terms of improving the quality of learning and transforming higher education in India for a competitive marketplace. Twenty-five private universities were established in the last four years. As private higher education is expanding, the trade in higher education services is increasing and the regulatory system will have to monitor that commercialisation is avoided as much as possible.

Sudhanshu Bhushan and Vijay Vrat Arya
Department of Higher and Professional Education, National University of Educational Planning and Administration (NUEPA), 17-B Sri Aurobindo Marg, New Delhi 110016, India
www.nuepa.org
bhushan.sudhanshu@gmail.com
vijay.v.arya@gmail.com

See also

The National Knowledge Commission on Higher Education
http://knowledgecommission.gov.in/focus/higher.asp

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