Education in the eye of language conflict

[1]

English is the undisputed king in the global radar of spoken languages. And it has become synonymous with good education in India. It is more than a notion that English helps get good jobs and opens up better opportunities. So, why did Rajya Sabha MPs get all worked up over the use of English language as the medium of

examination in the IITs at a session recently? The trouble started when Human Resource Development Minister Kapil Sibal said that the Indian Institutes of Technology are autonomous bodies, which are free to decide on the language for examination and curriculum following which the Opposition demanded the use of Hindi and other languages in the IIT examination.
Though IIT-JEE test exists in Hindi, setting the curriculum in Hindi and vernacular languages is not going to be an easy task if at all the government thinks of implementing the same.
Prateek Sabharwal, an ex-IITian and now a market analyst, feels that since most students have learnt the terms in English before joining college, it makes sense to have everything in English. “I agree that students who study in vernacular medium schools have equal rights to quality education, it becomes very difficult operationally to cope in English when they get through. In some courses/subjects, there may be 10 people from different parts of India. Do we expect the professor to know 10 different languages, and set up the paper in those languages? English has unified our system and I don’t see a point in why college education should be any different,” he says.
That compels us to think as to how many teachers are capable of teaching engineering in Hindi? Neeta Saxena, an English teacher, says that if we have the curriculum in different languages, it will be a Herculean task to manage.
“It will subsequently bring down global standards that IIT is known for. And the most important question here is, do we have teachers who can teach engineering of such a high caliber in vernacular languages?” she says.
Experts warn that we should not think of a move in which we have students but have to look for teachers. “Otherwise it will become like the SC reservations for IAS,” quips Neeta.
“It’s not practical to implement this because it is not feasible to arrange different classes for students of different languages. If a student wants to study further in a foreign university, he will not be able to do so. Will they then demand foreign universities to teach in Indian vernacular languages?’ asks Rahul Khandelwal, an IIT Delhi alumnus.
When it comes to jobs, recruiters worry that candidates who have studied in a language other than English will not be preferred in the global market. “We won’t be able to hire a candidate who has not completed his studies in English. They will have to work with their international counterparts, how are they going to deal with it?” says Mansi Srivas, a freelance recruiter for MNCs.