India’s many languages are an advantage, not a roadblock

India’s many languages are an advantage, not a roadblock
Virat Divyakirti29 Jun 2014




Chronic under-investment in linguistic infrastructure, linguistic infighting, and sheer myopia have given us the result that we have: English educated elite with infrastructure (5 per cent), Indian language educated masses without infrastructure (70 per cent), and illiterates (25 per cent).

Recent talk of promoting the use of Hindi has stirred up much debate.

The question of language has come up several times in the history of modern India. The Hindi majority carries a sense of entitlement that Hindi should be made the national language of the country. However India is a linguistically rich country and non-Hindi speakers resist such moves to the extent of threatening to divide the country. English – the common outsider – finds acceptance. There are global, economic and historical factors that facilitate that acceptance.

It is surprising that the debate on such a multifaceted issue polarises into a Hindi versus English contest. Arguments in support of Hindi have primarily been rooted in nationalistic and cultural thought. Yet the accepted solution — English — does nothing to address the prime driver of opposition – regional identity. There are more tangible reasons which entail that neither English nor Hindi and nor even both together should be imposed upon India.

Lying with statistics

There is no dispute that India’s priority is economic growth. Therefore first and foremost the language question must be addressed within that criterion.

Manish Sabharwal, founder Team Lease, in an NDTV debate, represented the school of thought that believes that the idea of replacing English with Indian languages is ludicrous. He conveyed that English would be critical towards realising India’s demographic dividend.

There was some truth in his statement when he said that English opens a window to the world. However it is also true that the non-English world is far bigger. Sankrant Sanu (2007) in his seminal work, The English Class System, explodes the myth that English alone can open a window. English and Hindi (in Hindustani form) are spoken by half-a-billion people each. Half-a-billion people is a world unto itself.

His other argument was that English increases employability by 300 per cent. As per public sources Team Lease’s selection ratio is 3 per cent. When we look at the two numbers together, the insight we draw is that out of every 1000 applicants, they are only able to place a meagre 30, and of these 30, eight are placed even without English competence. By throwing up irrelevant statistics, the focus is taken away from the fundamental problem of low job generation. Is the answer then increasing English competence? Further proliferation of English competence would only mean that we will have English educated unemployed.

Infrastructural deficit

The relevant question is – why don’t we have enough jobs that could leverage the demographic dividend and pull India out of poverty trap? The Global Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI) developed at University of Oxford captures the multi-dimensional nature of poverty. Education has been allotted 33 per cent weight in the MPI. However the subcomponents of Education — ‘years of schooling’ and ‘school attendance’ fail to account for a person’s ability to apply the education towards economic activities.

In contemporary development economics, deficit of hard (such as water, transportation etc.) and soft (policy environment) infrastructure is recognised as a barrier to poverty eradication. When infrastructure is available, people are self-driven in their economic initiatives.

Whereas MPI acknowledges that education is a cause of people’s economic actions, it fails to take cognisance that actions such as obtaining knowledge, information processing, communication and transactions take place within a linguistic context. We posit that the options open to an educated person are limited by the linguistic infrastructure available in the language of the person’s education. The linguistic infrastructure comprises of factors such as access to latest knowledge, products, services and domain specific language community.

Talking about the digital divide is fashionable in development community but little attention is paid to the linguistic infrastructure that supports digital connectivity. However from the corporate world Google India’s Rajan Anandan does recognise that content availability in Indian languages would be the key driver of internet usage growth.

Chronic under-investment in linguistic infrastructure, linguistic infighting, and sheer myopia have given us the result that we have: English educated elite with infrastructure (5 per cent), Indian language educated masses without infrastructure (70 per cent), and illiterates (25 per cent). Given that the Governments did not have a major role in creating English infrastructure, the king actually walks naked after 65 years of weaving.

Before we decide to go down a road we must evaluate the cost and time needed for accomplishing the goal of English for everyone vis-à-vis building our own linguistic infrastructure. For the sake of analysis if we simplify and formulate the problem as: How will we disseminate one page of knowledge in English to a country of 1 billion that speaks 22 languages? Between teaching everyone English and translating the page into people’s languages, which option will be cost efficient? If the page of knowledge was actually a call for action, which option will get faster response? Answers to economic questions are not as complex as some economists would want us to believe and ICT is making multilingualism easier than ever before.

The quest continues

We have to create our jobs ourselves and we have to find the answers to issues we face ourselves. Appreciation of how others manage similar issues could help. Whereas we pride ourselves on our promise of linguistic diversity, the European Union with 24 official working languages is a live celebration of linguistic diversity. Even very small countries like Norway, Denmark, Slovakia, Hungary and many others with populations smaller than some of our cities have thriving linguistic infrastructure. We must ask why they continue to nurture these little known languages. If we are convinced then we must learn how.

Laissez-faireism does not work for public goods such as linguistic infrastructure. India’s answer to the linguistic issue would have a determining role in whether she rises to be a super power or remains a super promise that couldn’t be redeemed.


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