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On our way to Tokyo last month for a long-desired holiday in Japan, my wife and I had to change planes in the Chinese city of Guangzhou. |
Three youngish looking men and three equally young girls were manning the transit desk of China Southern airlines.
As one of them greeted us and took our boarding passes and passports for verification I could not help notice that all of them were wearing very colourful lapel pins on their jackets.
And on each one of them was written: “I CAN SPEAK ENGLISH” in bold letters.
A bit of research, or “googling” if you wish, at a later date revealed that China spends as much as $75bn every year to teach English to nearly 400mn boys and girls and young men and women.
For the 2008 summer Olympics in Beijing, China gave English lessons to 600,000 people so as to prepare them to receive athletes, officials and spectators from all over the world.
China’s thirst for knowledge of English is not based on the whimsical imagination of the country’s president or any member of the ruling communist party.
Fact is, there are as many as 75 countries where English is either the official language or the second language.
Close to a billion people, or one out of every seven man, woman or child in the world speaks/understands English.
China also found that these 75 countries possessed 70% of the world’s wealth, which means that English literacy is very closely linked to your economic well-being.
So China, very possibly on way to becoming the world’s biggest economic power in the next two to three decades, is learning English even as the rest of the world is eagerly learning Chinese/Mandarin.
The rest of the world, that is, except perhaps India!
Thanks to Lord Macaulay we are okay with English. Hence we should actually be seeking new pastures on the world arena.
Instead we are looking to go back 5,000 years and resurrect and learn a language that exists only in scriptures.
So, if Smriti Irani, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s specially chosen minister for human resources development, has her way, soon you could be landing in Mumbai and Delhi’s international airports to be greeted by airline staff who could be wearing lapel pins announcing, “I CAN SPEAK SANSKRIT.”
Or whatever that may be in its translated form in the ancient Indian language.
In her eagerness to show how well tuned-in she is to her ministry’s responsibilities as the guardian of all education in the country, Irani searched high and low to come up with the discovery that India’s Constitution did not allow any foreign language to be taught in schools as the third language.
Yes, a few teachers of Sanskrit had gone to court in support of their demand to popularise Sanskrit but even they had not noticed the constitutional point.
So, on October 27 she declared that the teaching of German in schools run by the federal government, known as ‘Kendriya Vidyalaya’, must stop.
Her bureaucrats, ever eager to please their boss, ordered that German shall cease to exist in the curriculum of all such schools forthwith and that in its place Sanskrit shall be the third language.
Isn’t it strange that when the prime minister is showing his fondness for modern-day technology and tools that could gallop India to the top of an ever-shrinking world, his HRD minister is championing the cause of a language that only lives in history and can only help make India an island far removed from the rest of the world?
Yes, Irani has reiterated that she is not exactly favouring the study of Sanskrit over any other language and that any modern Indian language can be the third option.
But the question is why not a foreign language that could provide the kind of exposure for students looking for employment opportunities outside the country.
After all the economy is getting globalised by the day and physical land barriers are fast becoming irrelevant making it more attractive for young men and women to find jobs of their liking outside the country.
That will be the empowering of the youth, nearly 600mn of them, which Modi has been propounding ever since he became the BJP’s prime ministerial candidate.
A budget of 1mn euros and 70,000 students may not sound too big in the Indian context but these are the figures with which the German embassy in India is directly involved through sponsorship in these ‘Kendriya Vidyalayas’.
There are hundreds of thousands of students in private schools learning languages as different as French, Russian, Spanish or Mandarin as their third language.
Now a constitutional objection has been raised, which means that the ban on study of German or other foreign languages will not be confined to government-run schools alone.
So it will be the turn of the private schools to stop teaching anything other than strictly Indian.
Modi’s “Make in India” is obviously finding new meanings!
Irani’s interpretation of the Constitution may, after all, be flawed. According to experts, although the VIII Schedule of the Constitution of India does list a number of languages, it does not say that only these languages must be taught in schools.
And if, for a moment, one were to concede that Irani is right, then, as someone supposedly responsible to bring up the future generations of Indians well suited for the challenges of an ever-competitive world, is it not incumbent on the minister to provide all such opportunities that could help these youth to accomplish that task?
The winter session of parliament, which began on Monday, is slated to discuss and pass several laws, including possibly a constitutional amendment to facilitate the introduction of the goods and services tax (GST).
If only Irani, instead of attempting to resurrect a dead language, had campaigned for another amendment to broad-base the language formula for schools!
Irani, of course, is not new to controversies. Her very first day in office saw allegations, mostly by a jealous and defeated opposition, being flung at her for having given wrong declarations about her educational qualifications.
Then came a confrontation with the Delhi University on a four-year undergraduate programme where Irani was very obviously goading her bureaucrats of the University Grants Commission (UGC) to come down heavily on the country’s premier central university.
Even before the university finally caved in, the UGC, again with tacit approval from Irani, was taking on the IITs to try and bring them under its control, an attempt that has yet to produce results but Irani, for all one knows, could have only left it for another day.
The minister was at the centre of another controversial decision to force all children in government schools to listen to Modi’s speech on September 5 which is Teacher’s Day in India.
Then there were reports of favouritism in the appointment of Vishram Jamdar, a self-proclaimed RSS member and an Irani acolyte, to the chairmanship of a central university in Nagpur.
And now this third language issue.
It is six months into the Modi regime and already several neutral analysts and columnists have started critically appraising the work done so far and they are not being very enthusiastic, so much so that Finance Minister Arun Jaitley had to go on record declaring that some very important second generation reforms are being tabled in parliament soon.
(Jaitley, who is closest to Modi in the cabinet, must be hoping that a resurgent economy could hide many of the other unsettling aberrations that the government is facing from time to time. But the main opposition Congress is ambivalent while others like the Trinamool Congress and JDU have declared their hostility in no uncertain terms. So let’s wait in hope.)
Modi, however, has maintained a deafening silence over the language issue even though German Chancellor Angela Merkel found it serious enough to raise it during their brief meeting on the sidelines of the G-20 summit in Australia earlier this month.
But if the prime minister were to sit down and make a list of ministers who have been more obstructionist than helpful in achieving his dream of “less government, more governance”, Irani should rank up there.
Or is that why there is talk that Irani will soon be eased out of the ministry and asked to lead the campaign for the assembly elections in Delhi slated for early 2015?
Only time will tell what Irani will have in store for the national capital if she were to become its chief minister! For one, you, Dear Reader, may be burdened with an ‘Indraprastha Diary’!
