Deprivation’s real language. Fairly original thinking. Proficiency in language not only influences one’s culture, but also skill set, economic and whole range of things which remain totally unthought-of of and unaddressed. Addressing such questions also falls under the realm of Hindutva. In independent Bharat, media and Government have ignored national language and have promoted colonial English language.
http://www.indianexpress.com/story/12662.html
Madhu Purnima Kishwar
Posted online: Friday, September 15, 2006 at
Suggestions, both private and official, have inundated the Moily Oversight Committee on OBC reservations in institutions of higher education. The commerce ministry’s call for a liberal education order is the latest in a long line of varied advice. But all the suggestions have one thing in common and they share this with the reservation policy itself: the flawed assumption that deprivation has only two facets in India — being born in a caste or tribe listed in government records as backward or depressed, and/or being born in a poor family.
In reality, the single most influential factor that determines access to elite educational institutions, and hence to important avenues of economic and social advancement, is command over the English language. The advantage that English-based education provides often trumps the traditional divides of caste and class.
However, despite the dominance of English in our education system for over a century, proficiency in English is unattainable for most and creates conditions of unequal competition for the vast majority. More than a century and a half after English came to be imposed as a language of governance and for the elite professions, no more than 1 per cent of our people use it as a first or second language. The rest find all avenues of advancement firmly shut before them. A person who has failed to acquire this magical skill may be a first-rate scholar in Marathi, Hindi or Assamese but that will not make that person eligible for anything more than a peon’s job even within the linguistic boundaries of Maharashtra, UP or Assam — states in which these languages are spoken by millions of people.
No matter how high your caste, no matter how much land your family owns, if there is no good English-medium school within easy reach of your village, your children will end up at the bottom end of the job market. That is how the sons of the Jats of Haryana, Punjab and UP, who constitute the landowning and political elites in these two states, end up as bus conductors and drivers if their families reside in villages that do not have good English-medium schools close at hand. That is how so many Brahmins end up as street vendors when they migrate from poverty-ridden villages that do not have reasonable quality English-medium schools within easy reach.
Consider this: there are no medical or science and technology journals in any of the Indian languages, including those that are spoken by millions. India is the only country where no social science journal is published in any of the Indian languages. All “eminent” historians write their histories of India in English. All “eminent” sociologists publish their micro and macro level studies of Indian society in English. For those who are not well trained in handling the English language, all the new knowledge being generated about the past and present of Indian society is inaccessible.
There are no serious books or journals available to them in the subjects they study or teach. A large proportion of them have never read anything other than cheap student guidebooks, many of which are in turn written by poorly educated people. Consequently, most of those who have MAs and PhDs to their names, especially those from small town universities, are so poorly educated that they cannot write five correct sentences in the language in which they have to submit their thesis. Not surprisingly, high status scholarly conferences on Indian history, politics, sociology and even Indian religions are mostly held in American, British, even Australian and German universities, rather than in Kurukshetra, Patna or Meerut universities. Scholarly studies and translations of Indian epics and dharmic texts are also mostly done by Western scholars. As a result, their biases, their interpretations, their critiques become ours. We begin to view our successes, our failures, and our problems and delineate even our aspirations through the eyes of outsiders.
No medical school conducts courses in any of the Indian languages even though India has one of the oldest and most sophisticated traditions of medical knowledge and expertise. The medium of instruction and examination in all our schools of architecture as well as the course content is in English, even though India has an exceptionally well-developed and distinct architectural tradition of its own. No business management school would condescend to teach in any Indian language even though the entrepreneurial genius of our traditional business communities is legendary. It would be difficult, if not impossible, to find training manuals for plumbers, electricians or masons in Hindi, Marathi or Tamil. As a result, people who take to these occupations end up acquiring half-baked knowledge as apprentices on the job by observing the work of others, or by word of mouth.
India is one of the very few places in the world where pharmaceutical companies do not bother to write the names of the medicines they produce in any Indian language. Imagine what it means for those who are barely literate to decipher their prescriptions and understand the nature of treatment and medication prescribed to them. Our lawyers draft petitions in English on behalf of even those clients who do not know a word of English. Court proceedings, especially at the higher levels, are all carried out in English.
Unfortunately our political leaders do not consider this new source of inequality and disempowerment worth any attention because attacking this source of deprivation would require serious thought and effort There are no quick fixes here.
The writer is a senior fellow, Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, Delhi
Other Relevant article by N.S. Rajaram
The Hindu, June 11, 2006
EDUCATION: CONFRONTING THE REAL PROBLEM
Monopoly by an urban elite has led to exclusion, scarcity and rural decline.
N.S. Rajaram
Higher education monopoly
The politically charged atmosphere following the Government’s announcement of increased reservations for OBCs has obscured the real weakness of higher education in India— its domination by an urban elite at the cost of rural India where the bulk of India’s population lives. Increasing quotas and seats in professional institutions, even if they succeed, are unlikely to correct this imbalance: its beneficiaries will become part of this urban elite—the so-called creamy layer—without benefiting the villages.
Following independence, India has followed an education policy of setting up centers of excellence like the IITs and IIMs with an urban focus while ignoring the rural needs. These are consuming resources out of proportion to their numbers, while most other institutions are being starved. This has created scarcity in some disciplines that are crucial in today’s growing economy. The Boston Globe recently ran a front-page story on how companies like Infosys and Tata Consultancy Services are recruiting workers in the U.S. and other countries.
This means loss of jobs to Indians. It is a direct consequence of the scarcity induced by the exclusiveness of professional institutions in India, especially the IITs and the IIMs; these are full-fledged foreign institutions transplanted on Indian soil.
These elite institutions are renowned for the quality of their students, especially for their achievements after they graduate, and not for excellence in faculty research. The IITs are among the most exclusive in the world when it comes to selecting students. They can indulge in this luxury only because of India’s vast talent pool. These students would excel at any institution, but choose the IITs because of the job opportunities they bring.
It is not easy to see how this paradigm can be made to work for students from disadvantaged backgrounds, often coming from rural schools with poor infrastructure and indifferent teaching. My concern here is less over quotas lowering standards than the trauma experienced by unprepared students in a highly competitive environment and the resulting damage to their psyche. Reservations already exist in professional institutions in the form of NRI and ‘management’ quotas, for those with the money to pay hefty capitation fees. No one seems to have objected to them on grounds of quality.
The real issue is not quotas or increased seats, but making quality education accessible to sections of society beyond the urban elite. This calls for a fundamental change in perspective and a different educational paradigm.
Learning from history
Though American education is widely copied, the causes for its excellence are not appreciated. Its strength is it is a grassroots system of rural origins; it is not limited to an urban elite. It is worth visiting the American scene in which higher education took root and grew to become the envy of the world.
In the year 1862, when the U.S. like India in 1947 was an agricultural country, President Lincoln signed the land-grant education bill, known as the Morrill Act (after U.S. Congressman Justin Morrill). Under the act, each state was given 30,000 acres of government land to establish one or more colleges to teach “agricultural and the ‘mechanic’ arts”. Though the teaching of other subjects was allowed, the act promoted the development of scientific methods of agriculture and allied subjects.
Many of these institutions are known today as agricultural and mechanical colleges. Such renowned universities as Purdue, Texas A & M, Cornell, MIT and several others began life as land-grant colleges. As a result, unlike in elite Indian institutions, both the students and the faculty tend to be representative of the population as a whole and not drawn from an urban elite.
Thanks to the Morrill Act, students from all sections of society could get higher education without getting uprooted from their rural surroundings. At the same time, the colleges catered to the needs of the people by focusing on agriculture and allied subjects. Exceptionally gifted students could go on to elite institutions like Harvard, Yale and others for higher education. They would be fully prepared for the challenge.
India on the other hand tried to transplant foreign institutions of excellence without understanding the historical milieu in which they evolved. The result is before us— the gaping divide between the haves and the have-nots in professional education. It is not too late learn from the land-grant experience, though it does not mean blind copying, but evolving an educational policy suited to the needs of rural India. If present trends continue villages will become little more than suppliers of manual labor to cities.
N.S. Rajaram