Kanika Datta: The language barrier

SWOT

India's large English-speaking population, the country's 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 country's 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" schools""dubbed "public schools"""mushrooming 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 Truss's 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 government's 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 country's ability to fully reap the fruits of globalisation. The problem today is not that India lacks a sufficient number of people who know English""in 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