In an era dominated by artificial intelligence (AI), in which India is getting left behind, why is Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi forcing teenagers to learn the ancient language of Sanskrit?
Many parents are angry about this abrupt shift in education policy.
From July 1, ninth-graders must learn an additional third language at school, and two of those three languages must be indigenous. For the south of India, the policy revives the old fear of Hindi sneaking in by the back door to erode the region’s unique cultural and political identity.
In the Hindi-speaking north, the change sets the stage for Sanskrit to make a comeback at the expense of French and German.
That opens a Pandora’s Box. For instance, the more industrialized and prosperous Tamil Nadu in the south has been a staunch believer in teaching just two languages: Tamil and English. Sundar Pichai, the chief executive of Alphabet Inc, did not know much Hindi when he left his home state for college in another part of the country.
That supports the intuition of Tamil politicians: Fluency in the local language, spoken by an estimated 90 million people worldwide, roots students in their culture, while English links them to the global economy.
That brings us to north India. Growing up there in the 1970s, I studied three languages: Hindi, English and Sanskrit, but those were different times. In metropolitan cities today, it is increasingly common for sixth-graders to opt for French, German, Spanish or Japanese in addition to English and Hindi.
International certifications, especially in German and French, are coveted even among less affluent families for the career opportunities that they can open. In many instances, Hindi gets dropped in ninth grade.
This is what the new policy seeks to reverse. English would remain, but eventually all other foreign languages would effectively disappear from regular schools.
The hasty manner in which Modi has pushed the three-language project, which is a part of his 2020 National Education Policy, has unnerved families.
The policymakers say they want to promote multilingualism and its cognitive benefits. Fair enough — but why start in the ninth grade? A disruptive intrusion into a 14-year-old’s life might produce unintended consequences.
The elite would increasingly switch to more expensive options like the International Baccalaureate, while the less affluent would get stuck with Sanskrit in the north and Hindi in the south.
Returns on an additional year of schooling in India are already worse than in sub-Saharan Africa. From upgrading the curriculum to improving the pupil-teacher ratio, there are many areas that need urgent attention. Tinkering with languages is not one of them.
Those wanting to continue with a foreign tongue would have to pick it up as a fourth language. That is too much of a burden, especially for young science students, who must spend the last four years of school in a physical and emotional pressure cooker, preparing for highly competitive engineering and medical-school entrance exams. It is pointless, anyway: Students can drop the third language in Grade 11, and most would take the exit route.
The public’s patience with India’s education system is wearing thin. The Central Board of Secondary Education, the federal institution driving the language policy, is being roundly criticized for a botched-up shift to the digital marking of high-school exam papers, a failure for which Modi’s administration has taken considerable heat. At the same time, career-defining exams are getting cancelled because of paper leaks.
The youth have come out on the streets to protest. Politicians and bureaucrats are adding to their woes by embarking on a major curriculum change without giving schools or parents adequate time to prepare.
A July 1 deadline to implement a mid-May decision means just a month and a half to decide which languages can be offered at 24,000 CBSE-affiliated schools, produce textbooks, and find and train teachers.
The sheer impracticality of the task makes most parents and students hopeful of a last-minute change.
However, the policy has also attracted multiple legal challenges. One such petition is from Nidhi Sharma, a journalist in New Delhi, and other parents who are arguing before the Supreme Court that the move is arbitrary and unconstitutional.
Sharma’s daughter must discard four years of German for Sanskrit, a language to which she has zero exposure. She could have switched to Bengali, which she speaks fluently at home, but the school does not offer it.
“If you want us to develop a love for native Indian languages, give our children a real choice,” Sharma told me.
Sanskrit, which has the same script as Hindi, is the easiest option for schools: Managing teachers for even a handful of India’s 22 official languages is impossible. However, for students it is a raw deal. Just when they could do with a greater awareness of the modern world and a better shot at exchange scholarships in non-English-speaking countries, they are being forced to learn a language of antiquity. Because Sanskrit is a highly complex, rules-based language, classroom instruction almost always defaults to rote memorization.
Worse, the new learners would be utterly bored. Authorities have instructed schools to teach Grade 9 students using Grade 6 beginner textbooks.
To satisfy a nationalistic ideal that has little relevance in the age of AI, India’s teens are being forced to spend their most critical academic years memorizing the grammar of a classical language they would never use in daily life and whose beauty they would never glimpse — only to drop the subject the minute they turn 16.
Andy Mukherjee is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering industrial companies and financial services in Asia. Previously, he worked for Reuters, the Straits Times and Bloomberg News. This column reflects the personal views of the author and does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.
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