India losing English advantage to China
India is rapidly losing one of its clear economic advantages over China, with the number of Chinese able to speak English on par with its neighbour and rival.
A new study published by the British Council says China may already have more English speakers than India, a remarkable development, given the language legacy of British colonial rule in south Asia.
The study, English Next India, by David Graddol, reveals that India is likely to find it harder to compete with China, which already has better infrastructure and a more flexible labour market.
The study estimates less than 5 per cent of the Indian population speaks English. This would mean that by 2010 only about 55m people in India will be fluent English speakers.
The report compares this with an apparent 20m new Chinese speakers of English each year, a figure attributed to new education policies that require English to be a compulsory subject in China’s primary schools. According to an earlier British Council study, China had 200m English users in 1995.
In both countries exact figures are vague and those cited often confuse the number of students enrolled in English classes with real proficiency.
Nevertheless, English Next India highlights the lack of English-medium education as one main cause of India’s “educational failure”. It says this has hindered the spread of the language despite high demand for it from the employment sector.
Recent studies have shown that India’s talent pool may be drying out. With nearly two-thirds of India’s population under the age of 35, the country has the world’s largest pool of young people but is lagging competitively because of a gap in employer expectations and realities.
A recent survey of 150 Indian companies by the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry and the World Bank revealed that 64 per cent of Indian employers are “somewhat to not-at-all” satisfied with the quality of engineering graduate skills, which most notably include English language skills.
Speaking at the launch of English Next India, Nandan Nilekani, a co-founder of Infosys, an Indian IT company, highlighted the great potential for the Indian economy in sectors such as IT because its huge youth population is set to be the largest in the world in a few decades.
But he also warned that this ”demographic dividend” could turn into a “demographic disaster” if English-language education is not featured more prominently in India’s development plan.
The success of India’s IT sector has shown young Indians that the lack of English means a lack of access to opportunity, Mr Nilekani said. The British Council study cites government figures to show that a big shift from public schools to private schools in India may be because parents are aware of the importance of an English-medium education. The 2009 Annual State Education Report says 26 per cent of children in rural areas attend private school, a 9.6 per cent increase since 2005.
Whether the Chinese population will surpass India’s number of English speakers as a percentage of the population remains difficult to determine, as reports show progress in some sectors and not in others. For example, the bulk of China’s growing peacekeeping mission, which reflects its desire to become a big power, lacks one necessity: good English skills.