A case for English in the higher echelons of academics

 

First a disclaimer: This is a post for English and not against Hindi.

Very short, but, in my view, compelling points:

-While it may not take a very long to translate all technical/non-technical curricula into Hindi, the repository of technical and non-technical journals, research papers, and books in English in libraries and elsewhere in digital form is huge: almost 90%. If we change our undergrad technical and non-technical studies to Hindi, the undergrad students will lose that huge repository -a large part of which is free- forever. This will be a huge loss and will not be able to be made up. Ever.

-We are frittering away an advantage that we have. If we have to export professionals like doctors, nurses, engineers, software engineers, lawyers to other countries, the professionals going abroad, need to have done their undergrad studies in English. There is no gainsaying, that the countries wanting the professionals would want English as a link language in order that the foreign professionals enmesh seamlessly with their own body of knowledge.

-While it is fashionable to say that Koreans, Japanese, Chinese, and Russians do technical/non-technical studies in their own language, we must watch Korean, Japanese, Chinese, even Russian sitcoms/serials in Netflix and Primevideo to understand where these countries are going as far as foreign language adoption is concerned. Students in these countries are paying millions in yen, won, yuan, and ruble to get a grip of English. This expenditure for them is worthwhile because if world is the student's stage, then English is the is language of the dramatist.

-The folks pushing this new idea must have thought of this but I cannot reconcile as to how a doctor who has studied in Tamil medium would practice as part of Amrita Hospital in Faridabad. Conversely, how a doctor who did her MBBS in Bengali in RG Kar, Kolkata will do post grad in Vellore Christian College, where instruction would be in Tamil. Seemingly, all our professionals will have to work / do further studies only in their own states, or in states where their undergrad language would be the language of instruction/work.

Of course, for Indians, there are millions of points against English and trillions points for English, that English be the language of instruction in technical courses. But, for me, we are willfully denying ourselves accessibility to a body of knowledge out their in cyber space and elsewhere; to me, it is giving away a huge advantage to our competitors; to me, slowly but surely we will turn insular, while the world becomes global.