7th Anniversary Essay VI

Time to liberalise language policy The recent turn of events in Karnataka state involving closure of 1,416 schools needs to concern all conscientious citizens. The schools were ordered to be closed for contravening their licences, which were supposedly granted to the schools to teach only in the vernacular. According to the state‚s education minister, it is this contravention of the original licence which prompted him to come down hard on the schools, not because the state is anti-English. Laudable indeed. I wish every minister in the country was as conscientious in going about penalising wrong doers. The only problem is, those running liquor and gambling dens without any licences; operating travel, tourism and trucking businesses without proper licences; constructing huge commercial complexes on main roads with dubious licences; operating cinema halls in flagrant violation of all licences and thousands of others running all kinds of rackets with no licences at all, seldom attract the zealous persecution displayed by the minister for infringement of the law.The popular belief is that India has an edge over the Far East in general and China in particular with its strong grounding in English ‚ a big advantage in a world of services outsourcing and IT. It is in this context that in the past few years we‚ve made a 180-degree turnabout and have begun regarding our huge population as a competitive advantage rather than a millstone around our neck in the march towards development. It is a recent revelation that our population is among the youngest in the world (in fact one should have been surprised had this not been so, given that we have more babies being born here every moment than anywhere else in the world), which our leadership now tells us is a great advantage in the era of IT, call centres and BPOs. So all is supposedly well with shining India.Rather than consolidate this advantage, if it truly is an advantage, by ensuring that each and every child in the country is educated in English (together with the mother tongue), why do our politicians continue to insist on the vernacular as a medium of education at the elementary and primary level for the masses, even as they continue to send their own children abroad, mostly the US? Clearly, for our politicians, what is sauce for the goose is not sauce for the gander. To them, a populace exposed only to the vernacular and hence with limited exposure, is the vote bank. Not you and me ‚ readers of this column.Today, a youth who is a class X dropout with strong communication skills in English is more employable in India, say in a call centre or a five-star hotel, than an engineer who has studied throughout in the verna-cular and has trouble coming to grips even with basic technical terminology in English, because for 12 years in his high school, velocity was vega or gamanam and acceleration was vegotkarsha or gamanavegamu respectively depending on whether he is a Kannadiga or a…