Indian youth view English as a ladder to success, risking detachment from their roots. Are we losing our invaluable cultural heritage in the race to go global?
Walk into a café, college campus, or corporate office in urban India and you’ll likely hear conversations in English. For many young Indians, fluency in English has become a badge of status, a marker of intelligence, modernity, and opportunity. Those unable to speak it fluently often carry the social stigma of being labeled “backward” or “uneducated.”
The education system reinforces this bias. Private schools, coaching institutes, and even higher education overwhelmingly privilege English. Native languages are relegated to the margins, often treated as inferior.
The Cultural Cost of Abandoning Mother Tongues
Language is more than communication; it is cultural DNA. Embedded in regional idioms, folklores, and poetry are centuries of collective memory and wisdom. To lose a language is to suffer cultural amnesia.
- The nuanced emotions of a proverb.
- The rhythm of a folk song.
- The worldview is captured in grammar and metaphor.
All of these fade when languages are abandoned. We risk raising a generation articulate in a global tongue but mute in their own cultural context.
Data That Raises Alarm
- ASER 2023 (ages 14–18): About 25% of youths cannot fluently read a Grade-2 level passage in their regional language; about 57.3% can read simple English sentences, and among those readers, roughly 73.5% can explain the meaning. (Source: ASER—Annual Status of Education Report, 2023)
- Census 2011 (India): Only around ~10% of Indians report speaking some English (as a first/second/third language), which challenges the myth of widespread proficiency. (Source: Census 2011; summarized by Mint)
- Wage Premium for English: A well-cited study finds that fluent male English speakers earn ~34% higher wages on average, while those with basic English earn ~13% more than non-English speakers—evidence of the economic returns to language skills. (Source: Journal of Human Resources / IZA discussion paper)
- UNESCO (global language access): Roughly 40% of learners worldwide do not have access to education in a language they speak and understand. This is a barrier to learning and inclusion not a claim that “creativity falls by 40%.” (Source: UNESCO, Global Education Monitoring insights)
Global Lessons in Language Pride
Other nations show us the path:
- France has strict laws to protect French from English influence.
- South Korea’s “English Fever” coexists with immense pride in Hangul.
- Japan remains deeply rooted in Japanese while leading in global technology.
These countries prove that embracing modernity does not require cultural surrender.
The Indian Path Forward
India’s National Education Policy 2020 rightly emphasizes mother-tongue instruction until at least Grade 5, but implementation is patchy. Beyond policy, society must reimagine native languages as aspirational.
- Education Reform: Strengthen mother-tongue learning at primary and middle levels.
- Digital Revolution: Leverage initiatives like Bhashini to create podcasts, apps, and web series in diverse Indian languages.
- Social Awareness: Stop equating English with intelligence and mother tongue with inferiority. To be multilingual is not a weakness, it is a superpower.
Conclusion: The Balance We Must Strike
The solution is not English versus mother tongue. The solution is English and mother tongue.
To learn English is essential in today’s world. But to neglect one’s mother tongue is cultural suicide. A truly vibrant India will emerge only when its yout
