India's Complex Language Challenge

The New Education Policy is here. There are many good ideas in it and students (in Govt Schools) would benefit if some of them are implemented. Private school education has not waited for Government policy and they will continue to evolve faster than Govt policy. The NEP had its share of controversies over medium of teaching with an emphasis on local languages. Actually, most of the teaching in Govt schools is in local languages even today and am unclear why so many have concerns around it. Still the minister in charge had to issue a clarification.

Local language enthusiasts are right about one thing though, English language education places a lot of people at a disadvantage as they reach closer to college level. It imposes an unnecessary mental burden and only those with high self confidence overcome this barrier. In my view it is a national loss when you see so many talented people lost due to discomfort with the English language.

However, the language issue is much more complex that we are willing to discuss and debate

• The nation is a mix of numerous languages and dialects. Both Hindi and English serve a purpose but both are inefficient.
• I have already spoken about the challenges with English. Hindi is a practical language to get things done but is a huge problem when it comes to social networks. At workplaces and communities you have two social groups, people who speak Hindi as native language and people who don't. The tendency to form groups within our languages, our cities, our towns, our colleges, our religion and our castes is normal behaviour in India (whether we approve of it or not). However, with a fragmented non-Hindi speaking base, we are offering Hindi speakers an unnecessary advantage. Group behaviours are always exclusionary and this is not just about Hindi or English, that is the general tendency of groups. This by the way is the same problem with English now except that the problem is scaled up higher.
• So far the language issue has been under the surface as the economic disparities have remained low and economic growth quite decent. We are now heading to a newer territory with low growth and high disparity, how this will playout is difficult to say.

There are no easy solutions to be honest. Workplaces need common language and with Hindi speakers at fertility levels of nearly 3, the number of hindi speakers will cross a majority mark nationally in 10 years time. It was 37%, 50 years ago. So it is natural for people to use a language that comes naturally to them. This is an issue that must be handled with a lot of care and sensitivity and one would say that has been the case so far. But with elections becoming increasingly vicious, Hindi as an issue will keep popping up more often in the discussion than ever before.