Friday 22 March 2013

Consequences of using English as language of education in India

India, which was the richest country on earth and a great country in each term till 17th century, today is in no way comparable to its previous position. Apart from looting trillions of rupees from India, British did destroy our knowledge base and tried to make us forget our great Indian cultural heritage.

Historical Facts:
How the seeds of intellectual slavery were planted in us can be seen by this historical fact:

When British were trying to sustain their rule over India, British parliament sent historian/politician "Lord Macaulay" to figure out how it can be done. He came to India for the analysis and gave the following statement in British parliament in 1835.

“I have traveled across the length and breadth of India and I have not seen one person who is a beggar, who is a thief. Such wealth I have seen in this country, such high moral values, people of such caliber, that I do not think we would ever conquer this country, unless we break the very backbone of this nation, which is her spiritual and cultural heritage, and, therefore, I propose that we replace her old and ancient education system, her culture,……for if the Indians think that all that is foreign and English is good and greater than their own,……they will lose their self-esteem, their native self-culture and they will become what we want them, a truly dominated nation.”

When I see myself & around me, I find that he became successful in his dream of dominating our country. Because our generation’s mentality is "Speaking english is cool. Western culture is better than ours. Whatever is western is better."

English education was imposed on us to attract us towards western culture (so that we forget our culture & consider it inferior and subsequently lose our self-respect), and western products.

How Language affects our development:

Does education in English (foreign language) affect us?
Yes. Language experts say that speaking a foreign language influences how we interpret the world. It attracts you towards that culture and subsequently changes your thought process.

If you do your primary/higher education in foreign language, your knowledge base becomes very weak. If you gain education in your mother tongue your knowledge base becomes very strong (because you are emotionally attached to that knowledge), which is very necessary for fundamental research.

This is the reason that India is far behind in doing inventions/innovations and fetching Nobel prizes. While other smaller countries are way ahead of India, because they get education in their mother tongue.

Many bright students who could to better in research/invention/innovation are denied opportunities of higher education because of lack of knowledge of English (which works against India’s development).

And because of lack of depth in fundamental knowledge of science and technology, India is not able to come up with innovative products. And this is the reason; Indian consumer market is majorly dependent on products of MNCs, which is big loss to our economy because billions of Indian money goes into the country of origin of those MNCs every year.


Comparison with other Countries:
If we judge a country's richness by per capita GDP, you will see all the countries which are richer/more developed than India use their mother tongue as the official language.
Following are a few examples:
Germany, France, Italy, Japan, USA, China, Canada, Russia , Spain, Mexico, Colombia, Argentina, Austria, Switzerland, Belgium, Lichtenstein, Luxembourg, Taiwan, and Singapore.

There are many other countries who use their mother tongue as their official language and language of education and even then are way ahead of many English speaking countries.

Among top 10 economies of the world (by their nominal GDP) India is the only country which provides higher education in a foreign language (English). And India which uses English as language of education is at 140th rank in per capita GDP.

What could have been better:
There is a misconception that Indians get jobs because they are educated in English. The fact is that crores of Indians are considered unemployable because of lack of knowledge of English.

Had we used Sanskrit/mother tongue as the language of education since 1947, we not only could have given jobs to all our people but, would have created jobs for whole world as well, because then we would have been leading the world with our knowledge power. We would have been leading in research/inventions/innovations in the same way as we were leading before British invasion.
 
Need of the hour:
Because of poor leadership and lack of visionaries in politics we could not do it in 1947, but it is high time we start educating our children only in our mother tongue/Sanskrit (other countries have already started teaching Sanskrit to children, as it has been found most suitable language for development in all fields) to become the world leader, otherwise India will always remain a follower and will be in intellectual slavery for centuries to come.

Jai Hind.

Contributed By: Rahul Khedkar, PGP2012-14. He can be reached at pgp12033.rahul@iimraipur.ac.in.

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