Kiran Bhatty from India in her presentation Privatization of Public Services: Going Beyond the Small-State Paradigm compared the human development performance of the state of Himachal Pradesh and Haryana. According to her research, the state is effectively investing in education in Himachal and literacy is close to 97%. Despite weak infrastructure such as one-room schools, and in many instances under the tree makeshift schools, the teachers are present and some effective teaching-learning experience takes place. The role of parents and local state bureaucracy is also significant in this regard. In Haryana, private schools are mushrooming with low standards of education. Only a certain class of people can send their children to these private schools. Influential groups exiting the public education system have adverse consequences for the overall schooling structure. There is less at stake for not improving the system. Also as sons are generally preferred, the parents tend to send their sons and not daughters to private schools. Hence, privatization of education has serious impact on class, caste and gender equity.
Public education system delivers more in Himachal as compared to the performance of private schools in rural areas. Therefore, there is a need to strengthen the role of state in the provision of basic services.
Nils Rosemann's presentation on Water Privatization—the Human Right to Water as Guideline for Sustainable Water Management spoke about provision of water and as a basic human right. Nils Rosemann cited the case of privatization of water in Manila to illustrate the point that privatization of basic human needs such as water leaves the poor to the vagaries of multinational corporations and dynamics of foreign direct investment. According to him, more than 70% people in Pakistan do not have access to clean drinking water and creative public-private solutions are needed to generate resources to meet this basic human need and right.
Asad Hayauddin from the Ministry of Commerce, chaired the session. Karin Seigmann from SDPI as the discussant provided detailed comments on the presentations. She felt that Kiran Bhatty's paper did not explain what was particular about her case studies and how they are placed in comparison to other Indian states. She was also of the view that Nils Rosemann elaborated only the normative aspects of water privatisation and it would have been more useful if he was able to relate his actual experiences in Manila regarding water privatisation.
The discussion mostly revolved around provision of education as a public service in India. Participants were of the view that research on the state of education exhibits mixed results. Though private schools are thought to have better standards, public education has really delivered in Himachal Pradesh. On privatization of water, the participants were of the view that it is being pushed by the IMF-World Bank agenda under the neo-liberal framework. They debated whether the state or private sector is capable of effectively delivering public services to the public. After the cold war, private sector has been dominant. With the increasing influence of globalization, the privatization of public services such as health, education, water and selling off public assets is being pushed by the WTO regime.
Reported by Foqia Sadiq Khan
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