lakshmikanth wrote:But as they say hindsight 20/20, it is too late now. Time to own English and make it our bitch
As they also say, it is never too late.
Yes, English can be made into our bitch. It can be given a priority as an additional language we learn in order to communicate with the outside world. One can even enjoy its literature if one so wishes. However English should not have any place as a medium of education, language of administration of the Union, corporate management language, and only a junior role as the language of science in India.
But if one truly wants to make it our bitch, than what we should opt for is trying to popularize some really bastUrdized form of the language in music, movies and literature, which we can make popular outside India also, with lots of words from our regional languages thrown in. We can use our soft power reach to spoil the English in the world.
Of course, the people outside would also get to learn some Indian words as well in the process.
arnab wrote:3b. Learn Sanskrit (with a view to transforming this into a language of communication / transaction) over a period of a few generations.
Let us discuss the cost-benefit analysis of 3b. Let us start with the ‘higher education’ sector as it has been argued that people went in for English because there was no alternative to English in the higher ed sector. So one way to transform this would be to enforce teaching in the higher education sector (starting with the primary education sector) with Sanskrit technical and non-technical books and training teachers to learn the language, translate mostly English technical books into Sanskrit (there would be more of them than existed during the Meiji Restoration – but technically could be done).
Good Plan!
arnab wrote:However there is the existing pool of over 23 year olds (no longer in college) in the workforce who have access only to their own regional language and English. Now assuming it is a generational transformation, we would be conducting official and business transactions in a multi-lingual format for about 40 odd years till the last of them retire – bang goes our productivity.
Multi-lingual format is what already exists with such transactions being in regional languages, Hindi and English.
And no, there is no need to wait 40 years for the last one to retire. They get 15 years of transition. Those in the labour force who can learn Sanskrit as a replacement language for English (and Hindi ?), get to keep their jobs; those who can't, get to retire early, with lesser benefits.
arnab wrote:Next, our Gross Enrolment Ratio in higher education is currently around 18 per cent. This means that less than 1 in 5 persons in the age-group 18-23 are enrolled in higher education (mostly English) – of these probably half are actually educated to be productive in the work-force, but let us forget that for now. It took us 60 years to achieve this, after spending around Rs 60,000 crore per year on higher education alone in real terms. Now since learning Sanskrit will not miraculously make us more honest and plug leakages in the system, we can expect costs to be far higher to achieve this transformation and at the same time increase our educational attainment levels over time.
The 60,000 crores per year was used to impart knowledge in addition to doing it in English. Re-training only includes the use of Sanskrit as spoken and written language, as well as the use of Sanskrit for technical terms. Whereas eloquence in Sanskrit is the somewhat open-ended task, Sanskrit terminology for technical terms is a much smaller and well-defined set for any domain or field.
Also lets not forget the Sanskrit teaching and translation industry that would come up in India to oversee the transition. That industry too would be generating a lot of jobs.
arnab wrote:As per the suggestion we are planning to undertake a transformation of our educational attainment levels – by changing the language of instruction to Sanskrit. Yet presumably – we would still need English to engage with the rest of the world (they may oblige by learning Sanskrit but who knows).
They may oblige, but it will take some time, i.e. when India again attains the status we enjoyed in the days of old, when Sanskrit was the lingua franca of much of Eurasia.
arnab wrote:So people who have been brought up using Sanskrit – all our next generation IT whizkids, BPO operators, banking, finance and other service industries (which contributes the greatest share to our GDP) will be burdened with this additional costs of re-re training the workforce to know English
As also per suggestion, English would continue to remain a language additionally taught in schools, so that our interaction with the world does not suffer due to not knowing it.
I hope you can see the fallacy of your argument, that if we do not use English as the medium of instruction we fall back to the level of no knowledge of English at all, as in the case of some societies you mention. Some better argument must be possible.
arnab wrote:following the example of the Chinese and South koreans who are also pushing for learning english, despite being richer and mono-lingual socities).
First of all, Chinese are NOT a mono-lingual society. There are many many languages spoken in China with a couple more prominent than others. The good thing going for them is that they have a single script -
hànzì. However they have pushed for Mandarin as a language which all should know.
The question is not whether they are pushing for learning English, but rather whether any other major non-Anglo power is willing to make English as its primary medium of instruction, official administrative language, language for conducting internal business or even language of science. If at all, some countries allow ICT in English medium, but that is about it, and ICT is not the sum all of language needs of a nation.
arnab wrote:Smart move folks
Indeed.
. It took me the experience of living in a village in Northern Karnataka to realize how disconnected I was with India's reality, but what do I know as I am a youngistani (too old to be one actually) who derides English and joins the Yank 
