The language barrier

[Harold F. Schiffman]

 Kanika Datta: The language barrier

New Delhi April 06, 2006

Indias large English-speaking population, the countrys spin doctors would
have us believe, is one of the powerful engines that will propel India
past China and other BRIC competitors in the great globalisation stakes.
How strange, then, that the standard of English education is deteriorating
sharply.  With just 3 per cent of the countrys population said to be
literate in English, there is no doubt that English-literacy is a scarce
and valuable capability. Certainly, anyone with a working knowledge of the
language is in a position to command decent premiums in the jobs market.
This trend, in turn, has created a robust opportunity for the education
business. Thus we have private English medium schoolsdubbed public
schoolsmushrooming all over India to fulfil the thrusting ambitions of the
bright young women and men of middle class India.

It is safe to say, however, that Macaulay would hesitate to take credit
for the brave new English literates emerging from these education
factories. Many of them would be Lynne Trusss ultimate nightmare. You only
have to read the outpourings of young Indian bloggers on the Net or peruse
the personal ads sections of newspapers to gain an idea of the precarious
hold on spelling, grammar and punctuation that typifies the job seeker
today. The punctuation atrocities that Truss writes about in her peerless
book Eats, Shoots and Leaves have become the standard currency of written
communication even at high levels in corporate India. This stands in sharp
contrast to the older generations of Indians, few of whom attended tony
English-medium schools but commanded a sturdy and serviceable grasp of the
language.

True, the burden of responsibility for the decline in standards of English
education lies with the state governments. Local populist chauvinism in
the seventies and eighties drove English out of the compulsory curriculum
of state schools, subordinating it to an optional second language at the
high school level. This sometimes created comic situations. In West
Bengal, for instance, Shakespeare was interpreted for school-leaving
children in Bengali. The impact of the Left Front governments policy, now
reversed, was brought into sharp relief in the eighties and nineties as a
growing number of young job seekers found themselves trapped in a state in
which economic opportunity was steadily shrinking.

In an odd, and possibly indefinable, way it is also true that four decades
of economic protectionism engendered an attitude that steadily eroded this
one useful colonial heritage. The focus on self-sufficiency and import
substitution and the near-pariah status accorded to foreign direct
investment till the nineties bred a collective indifference to learning
English. Not unlike China, India became so inwardly focused that the need
to communicate with the world in a universal language diminished,
encouraged by a vague nationalistic stigma that attached itself to the
language.

So, concomitantly, did the rigour with which English was taught. It shows
up clearly in the requirements for board examinations today; using the
right key words in an answer sheet in the English exam earns students more
points than a well-written paragraph. This makes it entirely possible for
a student to score high marks in English, even if his actual fluency in
the language is a shade above Mind Your Language standard.  Economic
liberalisation has certainly changed attitudes, but that is yet to trickle
down to the important business of providing quality education.  Like so
many business schools of doubtful provenance that proliferate in abundance
in response to the explosion in demand, English-medium schools have become
all the rage. Most of them charge extortionate fees to provide the
rudiments of English literacy rather than a meaningful grasp of the
language.

All of this contributes to the great talent deficit that corporate India
is currently facing and, as China is learning, can limit the countrys
ability to fully reap the fruits of globalisation. The problem today is
not that India lacks a sufficient number of people who know Englishin
fact, the 3 per cent figure is probably a gross underestimate. India lacks
people with a sufficient knowledge of English. If India leads the stakes
over China in the English literacy race, it is solely because of a
colonial inheritance. As China scrambles to learn English ahead of the
Beijing Olympics, that gap will rapidly narrow. Unless Indian
educationists raise the bar on the quality of English education, the
country will fritter away a significant competitive advantage.

The views here are personal


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