Presenting his paper on `Trends in Education', organised by the Jamnaben Hirachand Ambani Saraswati Vidyamandir recently, Punalekar pointed out that Japan and Singapore were able to achieve higher GNP and excellent educational status due to flexible and viable negotiations they had with market forces.

In India -- where education was one of the goals of freedom movement -- Mahatma Gandhi tried to evolve an alternative, community based-system of education, an experiment which did not take deeper roots, he regretted. At the time of independence in 1947, only 14 per cent of the population was literate, only one child out of three had been enrolled in primary school.

Though each state determines independently the education structures to be adopted, the Union government has a clear responsibility regarding the quality of education. The Central Advisory Board of Education (CABE), set up during the pre-independent period in 1993, continues to play a leading role in the evolution and monitoring of educational policies and programmes, the most notable of which are the National Policy on Education (NPE), 1986, Programme of Action (POA), 1986 and a revived NPE and POA (1992).

Though education is now conceived as Human Resource Development, a concept borrowed from the west, all ideas about human resource development lose their relevance if the younger population remains uncared in their educational needs and aspirations, observed Punalekar.

In India, he pointed out, public investments in educational sector were not growing at expected pace. In 1970, for a total student population of 3217 millions, per student investments in India was US $ 40.2. By 1984, this per capita investment had increased to US $ 43.8 showing a measly growth rate of 0.6 per annum. In comparison Japan and US spent $ 2600 per student and Singapore $ 1332 per student. Most of these growth-oriented countries have an annual investment increment rate of 8 to 9 per cent.

Om whether privatisation of education could provide solutions, Punalekar believed it can, but maintained that it was possible only if individual merit is sustained by a positive, sustaining environment for learning and growing, created by private educationists. He, however, cautioned that the step will fail if private greed and profit maximization goals gain an upper hand in management and control of educational institutions and resources.

While admitting that ongoing reform process, which is because ofsocio-economic changes taking place the world over, is irreversible, Punalekar observed that market economy necessarily does not fuel efficiency. It can also promote the less efficient, and more resourceful, at the cost of the meritorious.