What is the Issue?

ICTs have the potential to transform any area they are used. In education, important goals such as enabling teachers and others in the large Indian education system to collaborate and generate local curriculum and digitize local and traditional knowledge, using free and open source software as tools to explore and reconstruct for meaningful and deeper learning, enabling greater transparency and accountability of the administration to the community etc can be achieved in significant measure. However for this to happen, there are two prerequisites, the policy should avoid falling prey to vested interests – Indian education system is perhaps the 'largest ICT market' in the world and the gains that technology vendors selling proprietary software or education content are potentially huge enough for them to subvert public interest. Secondly the policy can be beneficial only if it is made by those who understand the education domain and the Indian education context well, for the challenges and priorities are completely to do with education.

MHRD has ignored both canons by entrusting this policy making to two private organizations, (GeSCI and CSDMS), who have close association with technology vendors and have little education understanding, to facilitate making a national policy on ICTs in school education. These two organizations have been managing the policy making process over the last year through largely closed door consultations amongst technologists, technology vendors and education bureaucrats, consistently excluding a large body of Indian educationists. Despite serious concerns and protests from educationists and other public spirited individuals and organizations, this process lacking legitimacy and credibility continues. This creates the serious risk of having a policy that meets the market needs of vendors but would create severe problems for an already feeble and weakened Government school system in India.

Such brazen privatisation of policy making in India is a new low, though similar processes are beginning in the ICT policies in other domains as well e.g. e-Governance or e-Health where domain actors and those working in public interest have been completely ignored and private technological business entities given the prerogative of framing policy.