[lg policy] Bangalore: In India's call-centre capital, English is the language of money

Sun Aug 23 16:39:27 UTC 2009

In India's call-centre capital, English is the language of money

BANGALORE, INDIA — From Saturday's Globe and Mail
Last updated on Saturday, Aug. 22, 2009 01:31PM EDT

Krishna Mahbubani is bleary-eyed on a balmy Thursday evening in
Bangalore. The 21-year-old dragged himself out of bed 15 minutes ago,
and now sits sipping a steaming cup of chai and checking e-mail in his
family's airy seventh-floor apartment. Mr. Mahbubani has lived in the
Indian state of Karnataka for 12 years and has spent the past eight
months working as a call-centre operator for 24/7 Customer, an
American outsourcing business. Every night at 8:30, the company
minibus delivers him to a cubicle where he spends eight hours soothing
harried customers via telephone. "Between 12 at night and 4 in the
morning is the hardest. It takes time to get used to the schedule, and
sometimes foreigners talk very quick when they are angry," he says.

Dealing with enraged North Americans would be a nightmare for many,
but it pays. Mr. Mahbubani earns about $270 a month, nearly 10 times a
labourer's wages. "English makes all the difference. They don't care
what language you speak at a construction site, but at BPOs [business
process outsourcing companies], good English means good money," he
says. Fluency in Kannada, Karnataka's state language, wouldn't score
Mr. Mahbubani any points in a job interview. He considers himself
lucky to have attended a private English school in Mumbai as a child:
Until last month, English schools in Karnataka, home of the world's
call-centre capital, Bangalore, were outlawed.

"It's a universal language. How could they tell people not to speak
English?" he asks. India's Supreme Court struck down a 15-year ban on
English instruction at private schools in Karnataka on July 21,
opening the door to hundreds of new schools that could offer bilingual
or English-only classes to primary-school children. Schools that
opened before the 1994 ban had been in the clear, but any new schools
in the state were forced to either teach in Kannada, or teach English
under the radar, paying bribes to officials.

When the Supreme Court rejected the state government's appeal against
a lower-court decision quashing the English ban, the result of a 2006
petition filed on behalf of the Karnataka Unaided Schools Management
Association, it cited the importance of English education for children
growing up in contemporary India. "How do we survive in this world?
Parents do not want their children to be taught in their mother
tongue. Students who have studied in their mother tongue as a medium
fare poorly," Chief Justice K.G. Balakrishnan said in handing down the
decision. It's a question of survival for thousands of young Indians
whose livelihoods depend on a firm grasp of English.

Parents in India know that private schools offer the best English
education, but the growing prevalence of these institutes - from 2002
to 2007, total enrolment in government schools fell to 7.8 million
from eight million, and jumped in private schools to more than 7.9
million from 7.4 million - has caused a political backlash in India,
with populist parties delivering tailor-made anti-English policies to
appeal to the poor rural masses. During the May general elections, the
Samajwadi Party raised eyebrows when its leader, Mulayam Singh, vowed
to ban English education and the use of computers in India, warning
that both create devastating unemployment for non-English-speaking
rural citizens. The party won 22 seats out of 322, proving that it
still has an audience.

But India's flourishing urban middle class is hardly enthusiastic
about anti-English policies - especially in Karnataka, which touts
Bangalore as the icon of the new India, symbolic of middle-class
prosperity that has exploded over the past decade. The
second-fastest-growing city in India, Bangalore sees thousands flock
to its cosmopolitan streets each year in the hope of launching their
careers, and North Americans calling cellphone providers or airlines
will probably air their grievances to operators here. While it may be
tough to measure the effects of a language policy that was only
spottily enforced, Mr. Mahbubani says he has seen the effects. "Very
few of the freshers [new people] at 24/7 were really born in
Karnataka. Everyone else was raised somewhere else and moved here in
the 1990s," he says.

For the new generation of Bangaloreans, 53 per cent of whom hail from
other states, mother-tongue education is not a top priority. In the
"Silicon Valley of India," English-speaking white-collar workers are
the hot commodity. H.K. Sukanya Davi has taught Kannada to teenagers
at St. Mary's Public School for 22 years. During that time, she has
seen young people increasingly unenthused about Kannada lobby the
school for the right to drop classes in the mother tongue. "They don't
want it to be compulsory, but when you have moved to Bangalore and
you're staying in Karnataka, how can you not learn Kannada?" she asks.

"It is our roots and we should never let it go." Karnataka was the
only state with a ban on English instruction, but the issue has dogged
Indian society since the British arrived in the 17th century. Studies
have shown that children learn better in their mother tongue, and
India's National Curriculum Framework supports a trilingual policy in
which kids learn in their mother tongue, with English and Hindi
lessons on the side. But the country's charge toward modernity and
globalization makes the trilingual policy a hard sell to the next
generation. Not that it even matters for most Indian kids. Despite the
snowballing popularity of private institutions, a majority of
children, if they attend school at all, will do so at state-run
mother-tongue schools often characterized by shoddy facilities, high
teacher absenteeism and abysmal attendance.

For the 47 per cent of students who do not drop out of state schools
before they are 13, an English education will be rudimentary at best,
leading some to argue that cultural preservation is meaningless to an
impoverished student trying to get a leg up in life. "You can tell a
state-school student from a private-school student because the former
is unable to express himself. Half the time, the teachers in these
schools do not know English, let alone the children," says Brinda
Adige, a child-rights activist at Global Concerns India, a local
non-governmental organization. This month, the Indian government
passed its long-awaited Right to Education Bill, which stipulates that
private schools must reserve 25 per cent of their space for poor
children.

It's a start, Ms. Adige says, but she points to the fact that 70
million Indian children do not receive any sort of schooling at all -
public or private. According to her, a child's home state isn't
important: Money talks louder than any mother tongue. "For [poor]
students, it doesn't matter what the Supreme Court says. The real
issue is that most poor children will never attend private school,
never receive quality English instruction and never make it to
college. It's new-age feudalism."

Paige Aarhus is a Canadian writer living in Bangalore.

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/world/in-indias-call-centre-capital-english-is-the-language-of-money/article1261068/

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