Why Indian universities are ditching English-only education

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Why Indian universities are ditching English-only education

Native language education is more inclusive — but with 200+ spoken languages in India, it could leave India's tech ecosystems splintered.

Sujit Jaiswal/AFP/Getty Images
By NILESH CHRISTOPHER
7 FEBRUARY 2022 • BENGALURU, INDIA
Why Indian universities are ditching English-only education

Giriraj Bagla, a Ph.D. scholar at the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay (IIT-B), has loved mathematics since grade school. In 2010, he cracked the Joint Entrance Exam (JEE) — one of the toughest entrance tests in the world — on his first attempt. He was ranked 863rd out of roughly a million students who took the test, an impressive performance. But on joining the chemical engineering course at IIT-B, he was in for an unexpected ordeal: the course was taught entirely in English.

For Bagla, who grew up speaking and studying in Hindi, the complex mathematics equations he had to solve for the course weren’t hard. But he struggled with simple words like “circle,” “velocity,” and “displacement.” His textbooks, courses, and lectures were available only in English — a language that had been alien to him until then. He found himself struggling to understand what was being taught in class.

He took refuge in numbers and equations. Bagla told Rest of World that during his freshman year, “mathematics was the only subject I could understand.” But soon his grades started dropping. “I [had been] a school topper. But I could not perform well… because of this communication gap,” said Bagla, who now speaks English much more confidently, if not flawlessly.

Of the 10 million students who take high school finals in India every year, 65% come from non-English medium schools. However, higher education in the country, especially in STEM subjects, is currently almost entirely English based. For students, learning in a language that’s unfamiliar adds an additional challenge that may be insurmountable for some, leading thousands to drop out of premium institutes every year. The language barrier is more severe among marginalized communities where the dropout rates can go as high as 60%.

In response, India is seeing a surge in “mother tongue” education, with courses now being taught in Hindi, Marathi, Tamil, and other non-English languages. In 2021, 1,230 seats in state-approved engineering schools were allocated for study in native languages. The growing demand for accessing digital services in local languages forced the state to allocate money for the creation of a National Language Translation Mission last year, with the sole focus of expediting local-language translation. India’s apex body for technical education, All India Council for Technical Education, has bolstered efforts to translate online courses to eight Indian languages. Edtech giants that previously catered to the elite English-only market are now translating question banks and lectures, to cash in on the demand for non-English-based learning.

“It’s a very bad investment for the country to be leaving 99.9 % of the population behind so that a few people can become CEOs in America,” said Sankrant Sanu, author of the book The English Medium Myth.

Certainly not everyone is on board: at least one academic has called the recent trend “the beginning of the end” of India’s global technical competence. Academics believe that local-language technical education creates dissonance with global demand and that those students graduating from vernacular medium higher education institutes may struggle to find jobs.

“In the name of English, we have killed lots of innovation, and now it’s time that people who don’t know English can also excel.”

The trend toward mother tongue education comes from the upper echelons of government. The rise in nationalist politics, starting in the early 2010s, has led to the promotion of Indian languages, especially Hindi and Sanskrit, an ancient Indian language. The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), the ideological fount of the ruling Hindu nationalist government, has been a strong advocate for local language higher education and has been heavily involved in policy discussion. Prime Minister Narendra Modi recently emphasized the need to expand local-language corpora and dole out engineering degrees in regional languages.

This tension between monolingualism and multilingualism in post-colonial countries isn’t unique to India. Celebrated Kenyan novelist Ngũgĩ Wa Thiong’o describes a similar problem in his country, where schools and universities taught that Kenyan languages were “associated with negative qualities of backwardness, under-development, humiliation and punishment.” In India and Kenya, it’s not uncommon for children going to private schools to be punished for speaking “vernacular languages.”

In his book, Sanu contends that India, unlike its East Asian neighbors, privileges English-only higher education and promotes a language-class separation, “thus creating a glass ceiling for progress for those educated in the native languages.” A child from a village in Japan or China could aspire to be an engineer or doctor without a forced language medium shift. That can’t be said of Indian kids. “I’m not against English,” Sanu told Rest of World. “I think it’s a good skill to have. The only problem is when it becomes a barrier to entry, rather than just a skill.”

The UN’s Special Rapporteur on Minority recently recommended that quality public education in regional languages, as it reduces dropout rates, creates better learning outcomes, increases self-esteem, and improves levels of fluency both in mother tongue and official languages.

But, a shift toward native language education has unsettled scholars who see this as undoing years of progress in a country as diverse and fragmented as India. Per the recent census, India is home to 270 mother tongues, and a multilingual education model could irrevocably splinter the education system into islands of incoherence, said Geetha M, a pedagogist working on mother tongue education in the Kannada language.

India’s elite higher education institutes, including the IITs, have opposed the introduction of degrees in regional languages. Sanchit Khanna/Hindustan Times via Getty Images
“This idea of mother tongue, at least in the case of India, which is very multilingual, doesn’t really hold enough validity,” Geetha told Rest of World. Without a single unifying language, a student moving from one state to another for higher education may be expected to pick technical terms in a completely new language, she said. Geetha, who is a researcher at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, is of the view that mandatory regional language education also denies opportunities for poor students the chance to earn “cultural capital” through English learning and diminishes career prospects. She feels the newest education policy is a failure in taking English to India’s poorest.

The argument in favor of higher education in native languages also overlooks that without the widespread adoption of English, India wouldn’t have been able to compete globally the way it has over the last two decades. India’s success as a software exporter and the rise of the country’s IT industry in the 2000s is widely attributed to the English advantage, which created an outsourcing industry worth over $190 billion. Because of these perceived advantages of English-based education, several elite higher education institutes, including the premier IITs — the alma mater of several Indian-American CEOs — have vehemently opposed the introduction of degrees in regional languages, instead, they say that they would offer more support for students to navigate the English language barrier.

Despite simmering tensions, efforts to offer higher education in local languages are gaining traction with both private and state-backed entities.

Professor Ganesh Ramakrishnan of IIT-B has been at the forefront of the effort to improve Indian-language technical corpora through Project Udaan, an open-source machine translation software. Using the tool, students and publishers can create high-quality translations of engineering textbooks and contemporary research into Indian languages. The project, which went live in September, aims to publish 500 books in native languages in the engineering curriculum within three years.

“In the name of English, we have killed lots of innovation, and now it’s time that people who don’t know English can also excel,” said Himanshu Sharma, cofounder of Devnagri, a translation firm subtitling video lectures into local languages for K–12 students. About 70% of the firm’s revenue in the last year was from the education sector, a direct outcome of the mother tongue push through the new education policy.

Battle-hardened students such as Bagla, who was forced through language medium shift, says that the sooner one shifts to English medium, the better. He has little hope in the system accommodating students like him, and his advice to juniors who aspire to get accepted at premium institutes is: “There is no escaping this. You take time to transition, but ultimately you have to learn English.”

 

[Robbie3000]

Tough challenge when you don’t have a national language that all the ethnic groups speak like Swahili.

 

[hashmander]

good for them. if you're not making english compulsory for everyone as children then you shouldn't be teaching college classes in english because only the elite that got that kind of education growing up will have a fair shot.

 

[TELL ME YA CHEESIN FAM?]

Tough challenge when you don’t have a national language that all the ethnic groups speak like Swahili.

Isn't Hindi their Swahili?

 

[CopiousX]

Its okay for liberal arts. But Im kinda iffy on how practical a non-english curriculum would be in the non-math sciences. There are some concepts in chemistry, computer science, and biology with no foreign equivalent. Even worse is the medical field where everyone is still using latin/greek because a huge chunk of the groundwork was done in those languages.


God forbid ever having to work with international colleagues on these matters.

Isn't Hindi their Swahili?

No they got tamil, hindi, urdu, kannada and an infinite concoction of tribal languages. Hundreds of millions in each camp too.

Even tho we see them as all the same in the US, their national diversity is very similar to Africa's continental diversity. Its a miracle they managed to maintain the colonial organization the brittish handed them with all the diversity in their subcontinent. They honestly shouldve shed more regions than just pakistan and bangladesh.

 

[Sukairain]

To be honest I still think English is the way to go. It's the one language that is equally foreign to everybody in India, so it's a suitable lingua franca. There is no politics behind widespread adoption of English. None of the Indian languages are suitable for that. There is too much politics behind the imposition of Hindi as a lingua franca.

The solution would be to teach all kids English at school. English as a foreign language. Just like they do in many European countries. All other subjects can be taught in the local language, but every single child has to do 12 years' worth of English classes alongside that. So when they step up to university and start learning chemistry or engineering or whatever, it's ok because they should basically be as good as a native speaker after 12 years of English classes

 

[AquaCityBoy]

@L'esprit de l'escalier

 

[Professor Emeritus]

To be honest I still think English is the way to go. It's the one language that is equally foreign to everybody in India, so it's a suitable lingua franca. There is no politics behind widespread adoption of English. None of the Indian languages are suitable for that. There is too much politics behind the imposition of Hindi as a lingua franca.

The solution would be to teach all kids English at school. English as a foreign language. Just like they do in many European countries. All other subjects can be taught in the local language, but every single child has to do 12 years' worth of English classes alongside that. So when they step up to university and start learning chemistry or engineering or whatever, it's ok because they should basically be as good as a native speaker after 12 years of English classes

There's just not enough English teachers to make it happen. The people teaching English in Indian public schools right now can't even speak the language for shyt. It might be different in the south (where you're from if I remember right) but in the north English skills are a shytshow outside of the big cities and leading private schools.

And 12 years of English doesn't give you native English skills if your teachers suck and you don't have English at home. The Philippines has had universal English for a long time (at least in Manilla) and all it means for most of the poor kids is that they learn even less in all their other subjects and still don't know English either.

The hyper-focus on English in India also accentuates the brain drain. In the north there are a ton of Indian-trained doctors who do everything in English, won't even talk to their own patients if they don't speak English, treat them like shyt, and then run to America/UK/Australia/New Zealand the first chance they get. It's a class divide as strong as caste or color or wealth. I'm sure the same shyt happens in other industries where the top folk are highly educated.

India is large enough and has enough resources to have great universities in every state teaching in the local language. I don't think you need to cater to every single local language, but just take the major mother language in every state and have solid public universities that teach in that language. That would be the best way to ensure the highest quality instruction for the most people. Unfortunately, far too much of the Indian system is built around chasing Western opportunities rather than building your own shyt.

 

[Professor Emeritus]

Its okay for liberal arts. But Im kinda iffy on how practical a non-english curriculum would be in the non-math sciences. There are some concepts in chemistry, computer science, and biology with no foreign equivalent. Even worse is the medical field where everyone is still using latin/greek because a huge chunk of the groundwork was done in those languages.

Don't China, Japan, France, etc. get by just fine? Don't most spanish and portuguese-speaking countries still do their instruction in Spanish and Portuguese? If the instructors can't define the concept in their native tongue at even an undergraduate level then they don't fully understand the concept yet, it would seem that distilling that shyt into people's language is a bigger priority than forcing over a billion people to conform to a Western language.

The medical field is a fine example - people can use latin/greek here and there but no American's going to a medical school that does all its instruction in the Greek language. You can teach in your language and learn the English terms where necessary just like we teach in English and use Latin terms where necessary. Heck, just a few decades ago there was so much fundamental science work in German or French that some fields told their PhD level students they had to learn one of those languages....but they were never instructing the classes in German or French.

God forbid ever having to work with international colleagues on these matters.

A country with well over a billion people shouldn't be tailoring everything to "working with international colleagues". Sadly that's the current reality but it means their own population is completely neglected.

Even tho we see them as all the same in the US, their national diversity is very similar to Africa's continental diversity. Its a miracle they managed to maintain the colonial organization the brittish handed them with all the diversity in their subcontinent. They honestly shouldve shed more regions than just pakistan and bangladesh.

There was a ton more nationalism in India than there was pan-Africanism in Africa. I'm not sure shedding more regions would have been a win - do you think shedding Pakistan was a win? Partition resulted in around a million deaths, tens of millions displaced, hyper-intensified Muslim/Hindu division in both countries and has resulted in repeat warring ('47, '65, '71, '99 plus little flare-ups all the time). It's the driving reason behind religious fundamentalists grabbing control of both countries. It's the entire reason India and Pakistan are both full of nuclear weapons right now and as a result the way nuclear tech got to North Korea and Iran. Hell, if Pakistan remains part of India then it's entirely possible the Taliban is never formed.

Hindu Nationalism and Muslim Nationalism are the direct cause of most of the conflict in the region, Indian multiculturalism has been one of the most crucial factors in peaceful relations. I honestly think they would have been better off if they had stayed unified like they had under Congress/Gandhi's movements, but the extremists won the day in the end.

 

[Pressure]

As long as they focus on tech work they're going to need to speak English.

 

[ADevilYouKhow]

Will they learn Chinese?

 

[Sukairain]

. Heck, just a few decades ago there was so much fundamental science work in German or French that some fields told their PhD level students they had to learn one of those languages....but they were never instructing the classes in German or French.

This is an excellent point and I find it most persuasive out of all the things you said (including your direct reply to me). I am pursuing a PhD in humanities and I have to pick up ancient Greek and French, at a minimum. I've been learning both at my own expense outside of university for 18 months now.

I need to add at least one more language too, I am thinking Italian since having French gives me a leg up on learning Italian with regards to shared vocabulary and grammatical rules.

Ancient Greek is mandatory to read primary sources, but you also need two modern European languages to access the scholarship from those countries. In American universities it is mandatory to have two modern languages other than English for a PhD programme in a humanities subject. You actually have to pass a test for it, or else you flunk out of your PhD. But the language you write your thesis in is always going to be English, unless you actually move to Italy or France or whatever to do your PhD.

There's just not enough English teachers to make it happen. The people teaching English in Indian public schools right now can't even speak the language for shyt. It might be different in the south (where you're from if I remember right) but in the north English skills are a shytshow outside of the big cities and leading private schools.

And 12 years of English doesn't give you native English skills if your teachers suck and you don't have English at home. The Philippines has had universal English for a long time (at least in Manilla) and all it means for most of the poor kids is that they learn even less in all their other subjects and still don't know English either.

The hyper-focus on English in India also accentuates the brain drain. In the north there are a ton of Indian-trained doctors who do everything in English, won't even talk to their own patients if they don't speak English, treat them like shyt, and then run to America/UK/Australia/New Zealand the first chance they get. It's a class divide as strong as caste or color or wealth. I'm sure the same shyt happens in other industries where the top folk are highly educated.

India is large enough and has enough resources to have great universities in every state teaching in the local language. I don't think you need to cater to every single local language, but just take the major mother language in every state and have solid public universities that teach in that language. That would be the best way to ensure the highest quality instruction for the most people. Unfortunately, far too much of the Indian system is built around chasing Western opportunities rather than building your own shyt.

I assume this is all true, but you aren't quite seeing things the way I see them. How are we supposed to communicate with each other? It's a disadvantage unique to India I think, there aren't any other countries in the world with that many different major languages. It's a disadvantage that discourages internal immigration from one state to another, and also discourages interstate trade. Suppose you study in Kerala all the way through to postgrad in Malayalam, but then you are offered a job Uttar Pradesh or want to start a business there. Your education is useless unless you've learned Hindi, because you can't work or do business in Uttar Pradesh in Malayalam, you need Hindi.

There is a real need for a lingua franca. As it stands just about all Indians (excluding Hindi speakers) need to learn a second language anyway, something in addition to their native language. Why does it have to be Hindi? As you say my heritage is from the south and we resent the cultural hegemony of the Hindi speakers. They have disproportionate dominance over the union already because they constitute like a third of the national population. We don't need to give them any more advantages by making it the official lingua franca.

Hindi speakers are also arrogant and chauvinistic about the politics of language. When non-Hindi speakers find work or start a business in a Hindi-speaking state, they have to learn the language, there are no arguments about it, they can't survive without it and they usually undertake the effort to learn Hindi without complaint. But put a Hindi speaker in a non-Hindi-speaking state and they start complaining that nobody speaks Hindi. As far as they are concerned it is against the principles of the nation for there to be states where Hindi is not spoken. They have this entitled attitude that they are the default and everybody must be like them, but they must not be like anybody else. This is also why there is so much opposition in non-Hindi states towards the adoption of Hindi as a lingua franca. Nobody likes them because they have such a condescending and arrogant attitude.

English is the best option because it is equally foreign to everybody. Picking any other language gives the native speakers of that language a huge advantage over all other Indians. But there are no native speakers of English, so nobody gets a head start. English also has no political associations unlike Hindi, which as I said in the south Hindi stands for the grasping hand of Delhi, which the south has resisted against from the time of the Maurya empire 2300 years ago. Hindi has a stronger association with being an imperialist language in the Indian context than English does.

I know there are practical difficulties with English like insufficient teachers and poorly designed classes, and all the other points you make. But I prefer these practical difficulties to the political and historical ones.

By the way it's great to have you back again. I have only seen you around for a few days but as always the quality of discussion has markedly improved once you come around.

 

[Professor Emeritus]

I assume this is all true, but you aren't quite seeing things the way I see them. How are we supposed to communicate with each other? It's a disadvantage unique to India I think, there aren't any other countries in the world with that many different major languages. It's a disadvantage that discourages internal immigration from one state to another, and also discourages interstate trade. Suppose you study in Kerala all the way through to postgrad in Malayalam, but then you are offered a job Uttar Pradesh or want to start a business there. Your education is useless unless you've learned Hindi, because you can't work or do business in Uttar Pradesh in Malayalam, you need Hindi.

There are actually quite a few countries with multiple languages, even small ones. Switzerland is tiny yet has 4 different national languages (none of which are English) of which 3 are spoken by a large % of the population plus many folk speak English as well. And that's not counting Swiss German which is a different dialect from regular German. They make it work. Belgium is similar with three different languages (none English), of which the population is split between the leading two. Luxemborg has just 600,000 people yet they have 3 different administrative languages (none English) of which government officials have to be equipped to speak all three.

The common thread is that in most (all) of those other countries, people get to learn in their native language. Even in Finland where the Swedish-speaking population is a minority, Swedish speakers get to go to school in their native language, and can do so all the way up through university. Even in Canada where the French-speaking population is a minority, French speakers get to go to school in their native language. Switzerland has universities in all 3 of its main languages, Belgium has universities in both of its main languages, Luxemborg only has 1 university yet they instruct in 3 different languages (French, English, German) there and many courses are taught in 2 or even 3 languages simultaneously!!!

If India had a fantastic education system then everyone could learn Hindi, English, AND their local language. But that's a long way away. India doesn't have the resources to teach everyone English, but they do have the resources to teach everyone in their own state's main native tongue, if they chose to do so.

There is a real need for a lingua franca. As it stands just about all Indians (excluding Hindi speakers) need to learn a second language anyway, something in addition to their native language. Why does it have to be Hindi? As you say my heritage is from the south and we resent the cultural hegemony of the Hindi speakers. They have disproportionate dominance over the union already because they constitute like a third of the national population. We don't need to give them any more advantages by making it the official lingua franca.

Hindi speakers are also arrogant and chauvinistic about the politics of language. When non-Hindi speakers find work or start a business in a Hindi-speaking state, they have to learn the language, there are no arguments about it, they can't survive without it and they usually undertake the effort to learn Hindi without complaint. But put a Hindi speaker in a non-Hindi-speaking state and they start complaining that nobody speaks Hindi. As far as they are concerned it is against the principles of the nation for there to be states where Hindi is not spoken. They have this entitled attitude that they are the default and everybody must be like them, but they must not be like anybody else. This is also why there is so much opposition in non-Hindi states towards the adoption of Hindi as a lingua franca. Nobody likes them because they have such a condescending and arrogant attitude.

All of that is 100% true.

English is the best option because it is equally foreign to everybody. Picking any other language gives the native speakers of that language a huge advantage over all other Indians. But there are no native speakers of English, so nobody gets a head start. English also has no political associations unlike Hindi, which as I said in the south Hindi stands for the grasping hand of Delhi, which the south has resisted against from the time of the Maurya empire 2300 years ago. Hindi has a stronger association with being an imperialist language in the Indian context than English does.

I know there are practical difficulties with English like insufficient teachers and poorly designed classes, and all the other points you make. But I prefer these practical difficulties to the political and historical ones.

If there is a single lingua franca in India then I understand the arguments for English. I also understand the arguments for Hindi but I understand the arguments against it as well. But I really think if India wants to pursue the most effective development possible then it will work for getting as many people educated in their native language as possible. Bare minimum have serious state universities in Hindi, Urdu, Bengali, Kannada, Malayalam, Telugu, Tamil, Assamese, Odia, Marathi, Gujarati, and Punjabi. It's not even logistically difficult, with 1.4 billion people India could easily support those 12 languages just as easy as Switzerland supports 3 different languages with just 8 million people.

That isn't an argument against working towards English as a lingua franca, but that will take many decades and should be secondary. Mother-tongue education should be the first priority.

By the way it's great to have you back again. I have only seen you around for a few days but as always the quality of discussion has markedly improved once you come around.

Thanks breh, it's nice to feel noticed. But it's only cause I was home feeling under the weather for a few days and didn't feel clear-headed enough to get work done so I let myself get caught up in shyt too easy. I'm gonna ghost again soon.