Education as commodity: A critical discourse analysis of the marketisation of higher education in India

Abstract

This paper employs Fairclough’s Critical Discourse Analysis to examine how neoliberal rationalities are discursively legitimised within Indian higher education policy. Drawing on Giroux’s critical pedagogy and Foucault’s governmentality framework – used here as an integrated rather than parallel analytic – the study analyses the National Education Policy 2020 and related instruments. The paper argues that Indian higher education marketisation operates through a distinctive mechanism wherein the state simultaneously invokes constitutional social justice commitments toward Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes, Other Backward Classes, and Economically Weaker Sections while embedding market structures that undermine those commitments. Textual analysis reveals specific discursive strategies: the substitution of ‘scholarships’ and ‘targeted opportunities’ for the constitutional language of ‘reservation’; the repackaging of market deregulation as ‘autonomy’; and the deployment of equity vocabulary as rhetorical legitimation alongside provisions advancing privatisation. The study extends Giroux’s critical pedagogy by demonstrating that his class-based framework requires supplementation with caste-conscious analysis, and shows how caste-market intersections produce forms of exclusion structurally distinct from Western patterns.