A two paragraph ‘filler’ news report featured on April 19 in several dailies including the Times of India and The Hindu, has caused quite a stir in the academic and business communities of Chennai.
According to the English Proficiency Index (EPI) of the London-based Education First (EF, estb.1965) which bills itself as the world’s largest privately held education company and operates 400 language schools and offices in 50 countries, the communist-ruled People’s Republic of China has overtaken India in terms of English language proficiency. China has been ranked 29, one place above India (30) in an EF survey covering 44 countries where the first language is not English. The EF survey based on test data of 2.4 million people in 44 countries who took free online English tests over three years (2007-2009), indicates that Malaysia is the most English proficient country in Asia, with Norway ranked the most English proficient non-native English speaking country worldwide in a league table in which Kazakhstan is ranked last.
This news report has caused considerable disquiet in Chennai and Tamil Nadu because the state is reputed for its exclusive legacy boarding and international schools imparting excellent English language education, and is a leader in engineering education with over 450 engineering colleges churning out of 150,000 English literate graduates annually. Moreover Chennai is a hub of information technology (IT) and business process outsourcing (BPO) companies which employ English proficient youth in huge numbers. Now there’s growing fear of the large number of IT, BPO and engineering projects outsourced to Tamil Nadu companies and firms by western multinationals, flowing to China.
Although educationists and academics in Chennai are shocked by the ease with which India has surrendered its huge, centuries-old English proficiency lead over China, they aren’t surprised. They blame sub-nationalist politicians and bureaucrats in all states who are insistent upon imposing vernacular languages as the medium of instruction in primary schools. “For populist political reasons, the teaching-learning of English has been consistently discouraged in schools affiliated to state government examination boards. China has surpassed India in English language capability because with active official encouragement, well-trained teachers from English-speaking countries have been imported into their primary schools while official policy in most states is to discourage English learning. However, parents have woken up to the importance of English proficiency in a globalised world and are defying all odds to register children in English medium schools,” says Dr. D. Rajaganesan, former professor and head department of education, Madras University, and vice president of the Chennai-based English Language Teachers Association of India.
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Academics apart, even business and industry lead- ers are becoming increasingly uneasy about the economic impli-cations of India losing its historical English language proficiency advantage to neighbouring China. They are only too aware that India’s large English-speaking youth popula-tion was a key factor in the boom conditions being enjoyed by the IT and BPO industries. “Surveys conducted by us to assess employability skills of engineering graduates indicate that the IT and BPO industries are strug-gling to find candidates with good English communication skills, especially in tier-II and tier-III towns where students dread group discussions and interviews in English. State governments must wake up to this problem and ensure that English language learning is made compulsory from primary school to college level as China has already done. Indeed Chinese companies are emerging as a serious threat to India’s IT and BPO industries,” says Ambalavanan Ramachandran, managing director of Surge Forth Technologies, Chennai.
But with politicians of all parties committed to promoting Tamil pride and language for reasons not unconnected with lucrative textbooks printing and publishing contracts, response to the new China challenge is likely to be business as usual.
Hemalatha Raghupathi (Chennai)