Government places highest priority on strengthening the health sector

Government places highest priority on strengthening the health sector

Seeks partnership of the private sector to provide accessible & affordable healthcare

“The government places the highest priority to strengthening the health sector in the country. There is the highest level of political commitment for this” stated Shri J P Nadda, Minister for Health and Family Welfare stated this while delivering the keynote address at the Health and Immunisation Conference organised by the CII, at New Delhi today.

Shri Nadda stated that the National Health Mission (NHM), comprising of National Rural Health Mission (NRHM) and the National Urban Health Mission (NUHM), aims towards providing accessible, affordable, accountable, and effective primary healthcare facilities, especially to the rural population of the country with a particular emphasis on poor and vulnerable sections of the population. It encompasses programmes to cater to requirements of pregnant women, children and communicable as well as non-communicable diseases. He added that reducing maternal and child mortality are the foremost goals of National Health Mission, which has significantly fostered plans for child health in decentralised manner up-to district level. Steady progress in curbing child deaths has been achieved. India’s Under 5 Mortality Rate declined from 126 per 1,000 live births in 1990 to 49 per 1,000 live births in 2013, the Minister informed.

The Health Minister said that Mission Indradhanush has been able to fill in the gap in fully immunising children who have been left unvaccinated or are partially vaccinated under the routine immunisation programme. Three rounds have been completed and the fourth round will start from 7th July, the Health Minister stated. The Minister added that of all the methods of preventing the under-5 mortality, immunization is one of the most cost-effective public health interventions for protecting children from life threatening conditions, which are preventable. He stated that during these immunization rounds, 56.6 lakh children have been vaccinated and a total of 14.4 lakh children were fully vaccinated. Also, a total of 15.7 lakh pregnant women were vaccinated with tetanus toxoid vaccine during these three rounds. Shri Nadda also stated that cold chain network in the country has been the backbone of the Immunization Programme to ensure that right quantity/ quality of vaccines reach the target population.

The Health Minister sought the participation and partnership of the private sector in providing accessible, affordable and cost effective health care services in the country to complement the efforts of the government. He stated that with the support of the private sector, we will be able to further strengthen the Cold Chain and Supply Management system in the country. 

Digital India Week

Digital India Week

Several initiatives have been taken for introduction of Information Technology to empower people.  Some of the initiatives have resulted in development of products to extend various services in areas relating to health, education, labour and employment, commerce etc.  The Prime Minister Shri Narendra Modi would launch the Digital India Week this evening urging people to gain knowledge and  to empower themselves  through the Digital India Programme of his Government.

Digital India has been envisioned as an ambitious umbrella programme to transform India into a digitally empowered society and knowledge economy. It comprises of various initiatives under the single programme each targeted to prepare India for becoming a knowledge economy and for bringing good governance to citizens through synchronized and co-ordinated engagement of the entire Government. 

This programme has been envisaged and coordinated by the Department of Electronics and Information Technology (DeitY) in collaboration with various Central Ministries/Departments and State Governments. The Prime Minister as the Chairman of Monitoring Committee on Digital India, activities under the Digital India initiative is being carefully monitored. All the existing and ongoing e-Governance initiatives have been revamped to align them with the principles of Digital India.

The vision of Digital India programme also aims at inclusive growth in areas of electronic services, products, manufacturing and job opportunities etc. The vision of Digital India is centred on three key areas -

(i)      Digital Infrastructure as a Utility to Every Citizen

(ii)    Governance & Services on Demand and

(iii)   Digital Empowerment of Citizens

With the above vision, the Digital India programme aims to provide Broadband Highways, Universal Access to Mobile Connectivity,  Public Internet Access Programme,  E-Governance: Reforming Government through Technology, eKranti - Electronic Delivery of Services, Information for All, Electronics Manufacturing: Target Net Zero Imports,  IT for Jobs  and Early Harvest Programmes. Several projects/products have already launched or ready to be launched as indicated below:

·        Digital Locker System aims to minimize the usage of physical documents and enable sharing of e-documents across agencies. The sharing of the e-documents will be done through registered repositories thereby ensuring the authenticity of the documents online.

·        MyGov.in has been implemented as a platform for citizen engagement in governance, through a “Discuss”, “Do” and “Disseminate” approach. The mobile App for MyGov would bring these features to users on a mobile phone.

·        Swachh Bharat Mission (SBM) Mobile app would be used by people and Government organizations for achieving the goals of Swachh Bharat Mission.

·        eSign framework would allow citizens to digitally sign a document online using Aadhaar authentication.

·     The Online Registration System (ORS) under the eHospital application has been introduced. This application provides important services such as online registration, payment of fees and appointment, online diagnostic reports, enquiring availability of blood online etc.

·     National Scholarships Portal is a one stop solution for end to end scholarship process right from submission of student application, verification, sanction and disbursal to end beneficiary for all the scholarships provided by the Government of India.

·     DeitY has undertaken an initiative namely Digitize India Platform (DIP) for large scale digitization of records in the country that would facilitate efficient delivery of services to the citizens.

·     The Government of India has undertaken an initiative namely Bharat Net, a high speed digital highway to connect all 2.5 lakh Gram Panchayats of country. This would be the world’s largest rural broadband connectivity project using optical fibre.

·     BSNL has introduced Next Generation Network (NGN), to replace 30 year old exchanges, which is an IP based technology to manage all types of services like voice, data, multimedia/ video and other types of packet switched communication services.

·     BSNL has undertaken large scale deployment of Wi-Fi hotspots throughout the country. The user can latch on the BSNL Wi-Fi network through their mobile devices.

·     To deliver citizen services electronically and improve the way citizens and authorities transact with each other, it is imperative to have ubiquitous connectivity. The government also realises this need as reflected by including ‘broadband highways’ as one of the pillars of Digital India.  While connectivity is one criterion, enabling and providing technologies to facilitate delivery of services to citizens forms the other.

      Policy initiatives have also been undertaken by DeitY in the e- Governance domain like e-Kranti Framework, Policy on Adoption of Open Source Software for Government of India, Framework for Adoption of Open Source Software in e-Governance Systems, Policy on Open Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) for Government of India, E-mail Policy of Government of India, Policy on Use of IT Resources of Government of India, Policy on Collaborative Application Development by Opening the Source Code of Government Applications, Application Development & Re-Engineering Guidelines for Cloud Ready Applications

·     BPO Policy has been approved to create BPO centres in different North Eastern states and also in smaller / mofussil towns of other states.

·     Electronics Development Fund (EDF) Policy aims to promote Innovation, R&D, and Product Development and to create a resource pool of IP within the country to create a self-sustaining eco-system of Venture Funds.

·     National Centre for Flexible Electronics (NCFlexE) is an initiative of Government of India to promote research and innovation in the emerging area of Flexible Electronics.

·     Centre of Excellence on Internet on Things (IoT) is a joint initiative of Department of Electronics & Information Technology (DeitY), ERNET and NASSCOM.

The estimated impact of Digital India by 2019 would be cross cutting, ranging from broadband connectivity in all Panchayats, Wi-fi in schools and universities and Public Wi-Fihotspots. The programme will generate huge number of IT, Telecom and Electronics jobs, both directly and indirectly. Success of this programme will make India Digitally empowered and the leader in usage of IT in delivery of services related to various domains such as health, education, agriculture, banking, etc.

Foreign Service must remain elitist

As the Indian Foreign Service is already a shadow of its former self, India should not fritter away its strengths by diluting its specialised and professional character

Whether at the time of uncertainty over foreign policy before the Lok Sabha elections, or after Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s reinvigoration of foreign policy, foreign service reforms have focussed on expansion, lateral entry of officers and general dilution of the service’s elitist character. But no attention is given to the fact that the Indian Foreign Service (IFS) is already a shadow of its former self, and does not appeal to civil service aspirants. Most of those who join the IFS are those who did not qualify for the Indian Administrative Service (IAS). If IFS has to perform effectively, its elitism should be preserved, its attractiveness enhanced, and it should be brought to the centre of international relations as it was originally intended to be.

Partners in foreign policy

Nobody disputes the academic Amitabh Mattoo’s argument that “India’s foreign policy must be seen as a shared partnership across departments within the government of India, and academia and think tanks outside the traditional corridors of power” (“A new foreign policy agenda”, The Hindu, April 8, 2014). But the answer is not to merge the various partners while destroying the identity of each, but to allow each of them to develop in their own spheres and provide inputs to the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA). No one seems to suggest that the IAS and Indian Police Service should be expanded through lateral entry to improve their performance. The logic of this argument for the IFS seems to defy the need to preserve a specialised and professional foreign service. IFS, it should be noted, is no less professional or specialised than the other services.

Foreign policy is framed by various departments of the government, academia, think tanks and the media. They should all have their own defined roles in drafting foreign policy and must remain independent of each other. The MEA should not absorb them into a monolithic institution that has no diversity. Think tanks and the media should shape foreign policy from outside rather than from within the government. Is the right remedy to recruit media experts into the IFS in order to get their inputs on foreign policy? Would they fit into the bureaucratic milieu with its hierarchical and political constraints?

The usual lament is that the IFS is smaller (900 officers) than Chinese (4,000) and American (20,000) diplomatic services. This number is insufficient to meet the requirements of our 120 missions and 49 consulates. It is a fact that India started off with more missions than it could manage. It is not easy or politically correct to close down missions once they have begun; India, therefore, maintains them with a skeletal staff in marginal posts. Its larger missions are well-endowed and it does not need to be envious of bigger missions maintained by the U.S. or China. The right mix of need and affordability must determine the numbers. The information revolution should lead to a reduction, rather than an increase, in the number of missions abroad. The size of the service should not by itself detract from the efficiency of diplomacy.

Those who argue for expansion and lateral entry seem unaware of the fact that in most of India’s important missions, the IFS is in a minority, as it is staffed by officers of other Ministries. Many Ministries have preserved positions in the name of specialisation, but most of them are IAS officers, who may have been recruited specifically for assignments abroad. They may not even have gained experience in the concerned Ministries before being posted abroad. When there is such a practice, there should be no need to induct them into the foreign service itself. Moreover, Ministries such as Commerce, Finance, Industry, Environment, Science and Technology, Atomic Energy, Space and the Cabinet Secretariat have officers who specialise in various international negotiations. The missions are merely asked to service these delegations; even the heads of mission receive only a courtesy call and a cursory report. These officers function, in effect, as diplomats, and they should be added to the strength of the IFS when functional requirements are taken into account. In other words, we have more diplomats in action internationally than the strength of the IFS indicates.

If officers who claim their seniority on the basis of their services in totally unrelated areas enter the IFS laterally, this would only dilute the service’s quality. Past experience has shown that such entrants do not leave the service after a term or two, but remain to claim higher positions, spending their whole careers in diplomacy. If there is a need to induct officers from outside, the procedures available should be used rather than induct those who had once spurned the IFS. The expectations of advancement in the IFS should not be belied.

The MEA has already begun to recruit more officers every year, and that is the only way that such a specialised service should be expanded. If necessary, there are retired officers with proven ability, to fill the gaps without claiming high positions and salaries.

Reforms needed

The suggestion here is not that reform of the diplomatic service is unnecessary. First, it should be made more attractive so that the best candidates are chosen. Like Jawaharlal Nehru did, the aptitude and readiness of the selected candidates should be ascertained before they are chosen. It is patently wrong to take in officers who qualify without English proficiency. No amount of language training after entry into the service would equip them for the rigours of the work abroad. The recruitment of a large number of doctors and engineers is by no means negative, particularly in the context of the growth of technology. Some of India’s best diplomats have come from the medical profession. But we should not lose sight of the recent trend in management to deploy more graduates of social sciences and humanities. Training should be constantly revamped to equip officers to deal with different regions.

The present practice of posting on an ad hoc basis should cease. Officers should develop expertise in countries and regions. Multilateral postings should not be meant for rotational blessings, but for those who have the talent and experience. Instead of rotating officers so that they retire comfortably, we should give them other incentives to stay in tough assignments. Those in difficult places must be compensated financially. Postings, an art at present, should be made a science, with a clear criteria. There should be no vagaries of political influence or acceptability.

The real shortage of officers is not in missions abroad, but at the headquarters. Many heads of divisions cover whole continents with very little support. Temporary deputation of officers from various disciplines can strengthen the headquarters till we have a sufficient number of IFS officers to return. The style of the present Prime Minister seems to be to rely on a small number of people to work intensively on issues; this method could be developed into a system.

The role and relevance of the policy planning and historical divisions are often exaggerated. Policy planning cannot be done in a vacuum; it is the territorial divisions which can help formulate policy. The historical division should be a service unit, helping policymakers, as it is functioning right now. Nothing prevents the Ministry from drawing on the experience and wisdom of people from other fields, without absorbing them into the Ministry.

Many youngsters who aspire to the IFS have begun to believe that it really does not call the shots in foreign policymaking, as decision-making has passed on to the technical Ministries. They believe that the MEA has been reduced to a post office. Unless this impression is removed by concrete action, real talent cannot be attracted to the Videsh Bhawan. Foreign services are elitist in most countries, and India should not fritter away its strengths by diluting its specialised and professional character.

The promise of freight corridors

The much-delayed project to build the ambitious eastern and western dedicated freight corridors has received a boost with the Cabinet Committee on Economic Affairs approving a revised cost estimate for it. At Rs.81,459 crore, the figure is more than double the originally estimated Rs.28,181 crore. The 1,839-km-long eastern corridor will connect Ludhiana in Punjab with Dankuni in West Bengal. It will have two components, a double-track section and a single-track segment, both electrified. It will cut across six States. The eastern corridor will cater to traffic streams including coal, finished steel, cement and fertilizer. The western corridor will cover nearly 1,500 km, connecting the Jawaharlal Nehru Port near Mumbai with Dadri, and passing through States such as Haryana, Rajasthan, Gujarat and Maharashtra. A substantial portion of the revised cost will be met by way of debt from multilateral institutions such as the Japan International Cooperation Agency and the World Bank. The equity requirement of the Railways will be around Rs.23,796 crore. Dedicated Freight Corridor Corporation of India Ltd., the special purpose vehicle set up by the Railways to implement the project, is keen to complete it by 2017-18. Once the twin-corridor system is in place, it will transform the very profile of the Railways. A host of positive outcomes, such as reduction in transportation costs and stepped-up commercial activity, benefiting a range of core industries, could flow from it. This could in turn have a multiplier effect on the economy.

Poor infrastructure has been a principal worry for Indian industry. More often than not, this has affected its ability to be efficient providers of goods and services. End-consumers have been forced to pay for the collective inefficiency. The twin-corridor project was conceived in 2005 and was approvedby the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance government in 2008. The huge cost overruns owing to the time lapse tell their own tale, and reflect the massive challenge facing policy-planners in pushing through a project of this size and magnitude that has inter-State implications. From a slow decision-making process to roadblocks to land acquisition, there are problems aplenty in the way ahead for the project. No doubt, land acquisition is turning out to be a touchy political issue. Prevarication on the decision-making front will hurt the viability of even soundly conceived projects. The Narendra Modi-led government would do well to ensure that the twin-corridor project goes through without any further delay. The key to doing so will lie also in taking along the States concerned.

Needed, a new urban vision

Prime Minister Narendra Modi launched his flagship Smart Cities Missionproclaiming that governmental intervention in planning the cities would be minimal. He referred to a “bottom-up approach”, but did not emphasise who exactly would benefit from the cities. The approach suggests that India is breaking away from its Anglo-European architectural tradition, promoted by Jawaharlal Nehru in the 1960s with the projection of Chandigarh as a template for urban planners. Nehru’s aim was to create mixed-income cities with easy access to community infrastructure and to institutions such as the judiciary, the legislature and the executive. But Mr. Modi’s urban-planning approach contradicts that view and largely resonates with American-style urbanism. The government is putting the spotlight on smart cities and allowing the business community to lead the development. Let us take an example in the U.S. to figure out who could benefit from the new urban plans in India. In New York City, most of the commercial and residential buildings from uptown to downtown Manhattan are inhabited by the rich who can afford the huge rents. They have installed biometric security systems to keep the ‘unwanted people’ — that is, the poor — at bay. The city government has largely outsourced the public services to private companies, which are replacing the labour force with mechanised technology. As a result, the job market has become saturated. The unskilled workforce is caught up in a low-wage job cycle.

Before pushing India on to a similar American path, Prime Minister Modi must step back and re-think whether his government should invest in smart cities, or rather empower the existing urban centres by means of policies that cater to poor and middle class Indians. For instance, at present almost every Indian city faces sanitation issues due to the absence or inadequacy of drainage networks. The migration of people from rural areas to the urban peripheries continues at a rapid pace, resulting in the mushrooming of slums and unauthorised colonies. According to Census 2011, some 65 million people live in slums. The government’s response to the issue in terms of planning to build affordable housing for them is short-sighted. Smart cities would simply institutionalise the disparity within the cities instead of filling the lacunae. The last decade of urbanisation did change the academic and policy consensus toward urban centres, but ignored the fringes of these centres where those from the poor and the lower-middle class who came in a large influx ended up. In Delhi, the government passed on powers to residents’ welfare associations, which now decide on the choice of basic civic matters — and they always give preference to their own gated communities. Mr. Modi must take a forward-looking stance when it comes to developing urban India. Otherwise, the glossy vision of building smart cities could end up triggering a process of social apartheid.

India - The new global favourite?

India's performance in attracting foreign investment is in the news. Last week, the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development or Unctad released new data that placed India as the ninth largest recipient of foreign direct investment(FDI) in 2014. This was a significant improvement over 2013 when India was ranked as the fifteenth largest recipient of FDI.

In the space of one year, India has raced ahead of about half a dozen countries in attracting more FDI than them. The countries that India has left behind include France, Russia, Spain and Mexico. And the countries that are ahead of India in this list are China, Hong Kong, the United States, the United Kingdom, Singapore, Brazil, Canada and Australia. To be in this league should be no mean achievement.

That is not all. There are now reports that India is ranked number one in a new index that judges international investment destinations for their attractiveness to foreign investors. Daniel Altman's Baseline Profitability Index shows that India, at the top of this league, is ahead of China by several notches. Believe it or not, China's rank is 65, compared to 50 for the United States. The logic of the new index is that foreign investors evaluate the potential for increase in the value of their investment and growth. Based on these and some other parameters like corruption and the freedom to repatriate profits, the index shows that India is ahead of the rest.

Whatever may be the credibility or acceptability of such an assessment, both the Unctad listing and the new profitability index bring into sharp focus India's performance on the foreign investment front in the last few years. What do the composition and the source of such foreign investment indicate? Is it an outcome of the new government's investment-friendly policies? Or has the foreign investors' perception of India as an investment destination changed?

Foreign investment data for the last fifteen years show that India's foreign investment flows have seen an interesting trend in this period. They doubled in five years - rising from $4 billion in 2000-01 to $8.9 billion in 2005-06. The rise in the next ten years was even more striking. In 2006-07, foreign investment flows saw the most dramatic spurt as they went up to $22.8 billion and almost doubled in two years to $42 billion in 2008-09.

The global financial downturn made its impact on India's foreign investment flows as they declined to $38 billion and $35 billion in the subsequent two years. But the significant point is that there was no major setback to India's foreign direct investment flows in the following years. Indeed, India continued to attract more foreign direct investments at $47 billion in 2011-12. The years of 2012-13 and 2013-14 saw a dip in these flows to $34 billion and $36 billion, respectively. But last year (2014-15), India's foreign direct investment flows went up again to $45 billion.

But a closer look at these impressive numbers reveals three interesting trends. One, reinvested earnings by foreign investors in their entities in India have accounted for 25-30 per cent of the total foreign direct investment flows. In other words, these investments have not necessarily flown to or resulted in greenfield ventures. Instead, they are largely reinvestments to expand existing capacity. But the impact such reinvested earnings have on the economy as a whole is certainly different when compared to what fresh investments in a new project would have.

This is also a reflection of how setting up new ventures in the country has been problematic compared to expanding existing units. Apart from procedural problems in setting up new ventures, the hurdles created by the new land acquisition and rehabilitation law must have had an impact on the foreign investors' sentiment towards India. Why court trouble and delay if reinvesting your earnings in existing projects to expand capacity is faster and less problematic, they must have argued. And the data may just be bearing that out.

The second interesting trend is that a significant chunk of the total foreign investments has gone to the services sector, which includes banks, insurance ventures and outsourcing units. In the last 15 years, as much as 17 per cent of total foreign equity flows have gone towards the services sector. Policy makers could analyse why the manufacturing sector, whose revival is critical for growth, has so far attracted relatively low foreign investments. Why, for instance, the power sector should get only four per cent of total foreign equity inflows or the automobile sector's share should be only five per cent?

And finally, even though total foreign investments have been rising, India still figures quite low at 89 in the global ranking of countries with foreign investment measured as per cent of their gross domestic product.

Educational re-alignments

Of all the issues on the policy table, education is perhaps the domain allowing the smallest margin of error. Decisions taken today will have consequences that persist for decades and cannot be reversed. Universal and high-quality primary education will provide the foundations for all the initiatives related to production, productivity and employment to achieve success. Its absence will undermine the effectiveness of all these. On this score, the country's record is not great. While almost universal enrolment in primary school is certainly an achievement, it appears to be coming with a significant trade-off in quality. Most importantly, there is a significant drop-off in enrolment in secondary school, suggesting, among other things, inadequate preparation at the primary stage. The last thing the country needs in a globalising and technologically advancing international business environment is a poorly educated workforce.

My colleague Rohan Sandhu and I just co-edited a volume, Accelerating Access to Quality Education*. This brings together, besides an editorial introduction, 16 contributions from a variety of stakeholders in primary education. It also has six "last mile" perspectives: reflections on priorities and challenges from school leaders, teachers and education innovators. It provides a rich mix of insights and action recommendations to address the core objectives of any education policy, which are captured in the title of the volume. The framework bringing these three objectives together aligns closely with the themes that the Ministry of Human Resource Development is focusing on as it builds up to a new education policy.

I cannot capture the range and richness of the recommendations in this column; instead, I want to try and synthesise the perspectives in terms of alignment between the objectives themselves and the roles and responsibilities of different stakeholders.

At the first level, clearly, the trade-off between access and quality is a high price to pay. Lowering standards just to increase numbers may seem like a price worth paying in the short term, but, as I argued earlier, the consequences of inferior quality will beset people for a lifetime. The policy objective must be to ensure that expansion of access is accompanied by a host of measures to improve quality and sustain it. And looking at the challenges posed by numbers, there isn't any time to lose. Rapid expansion of capacity can only be done by experimenting with all kinds of delivery mechanisms. Many of these are already being tried in various situations, but typically at a small scale; how to scale or replicate successful models must be a central question in the policy debate.

In achieving these objectives, four broad stakeholder groups need to find alignment around the pivotal stakeholders, the students. These are teachers, parents, the community and the government. A number of perspectives on this critical group are presented in the volume and were discussed at a launch event organised last week. School leaders worry about their ability to motivate teachers to adapt new methods of delivering content and stimulating creativity in a very rigid contractual structure. Teachers find themselves being pulled between conflicting demands from basic teaching and increasing administrative loads from compliance requirements of various programmes. A no-detention policy, while it may have merits, increases the dispersion of capabilities in each class, making it difficult to pay attention to lagging students or mentor promising ones.

There appears to be a compelling case for re-designing leader and teacher training programmes. The basic B Ed syllabus seems not to have been changed for many years, even as there have been so much movement in content, pedagogy and technology. Leaders and teachers equipped with the foundations to deal with this movement are a necessary condition for the alignment between access and quality.

Parents are, obviously, an essential stakeholder group, but are they playing their role as wholly as they need to? The dominant view is that there is inadequate communication between teachers and parents on issues that really matter. There is, of course, a temptation to de-prioritise this particular channel of communication. The majority of students may be first-generation school-goers. Parents essentially see schools as custodians, not to be questioned, whatever they may do. And so on. But if the inadequate participation of parents in the process contributes to a deterioration in quality, ways must be found for more productive engagement. There are promising innovations that can template the interaction between teachers and parents independent of socio-economic conditions. These need to be encouraged in order to allow this critical stakeholder group to play its role to the fullest.

The role of the larger community cannot be questioned, but we need to move from generalities to specifics. A wide range of non-governmental organisations (NGOs) have been active in exploring alternative delivery mechanisms, many of which show promise on quality criteria. Whether these models can be used to expand access is a question that needs to be answered quickly. Systematically documenting and disseminating experiences, successful and failed, should be a priority for this network. Significantly, NGOs may play a productive role in partnering with public school systems in implementing new methods of both teaching and assessment. Holding public systems to account on the basis of transparent criteria is an important role for the communities that these systems serve.

Finally, there is the role of the government, which could fill a volume by itself. But let me highlight three important considerations in the context of this framework. First, it must create the space to encourage every promising model of delivery to scale up, subject to some clearly defined quality criteria being met. This means both more efficient utilisation of current capacity and legitimising innovative new models. There are outstanding examples of both cost-reducing and pedagogical innovations, which could greatly accelerate access wit quality. These must figure prominently in the choices the central and state governments will make.

Second, it must institutionalise assessment methods that test capabilities across an entire range, which is the irreversible trend globally. Third, many of the changes that are being suggested in relation to the roles and responsibilities of the other stakeholders require government to act, whether it is teacher training or more effective parental involvement. It is necessary to provide broad guidelines, but the temptation to over-engineer the processes must be resisted. Government cannot and should not be a dominant or overbearing partner in this process.