Tuesday 29 July 2014

The current UPSC row.

As the recent row over the UPSC exam pattern has escalated for worse only, something needs to be done; for sure in order to tame the problem or the problem can definitely inflict a huge attack on our motherland.

The contemporary fierce battle over the UPSC (Union Public Service Commission of India) CSAT exam is completely a language issue. On one side there are students who don’t want English to be included as a compulsory language while on the other side of the issue are those who consider English as a vital and crucial tool required to be handled by sophisticated to-be officers and therefore their aptitude and knowledge test (which demands a good grasp of English language upto class X level) is a must to check whether the aspirants are really able to handle the matters and duties assigned to them after becoming top class bureaucrats.

As far as my knowledge is concerned, the English aptitude and comprehension test is pretty much crucial for the applicants who want to succeed as top class bureaucrats in the future. Those who would one day be made to deal with high level matters need to have a very good hold on their language skills. In fact, it would not be a wrong thing to say that English is the language of the world. Today most of the nation’s (most of the European and American nations) speak English while those who don’t have their officials who have a good grasp of the language so as to avert any problem that could arise out due to language barriers in international meetings and dialogues, while on the other hand Hindi continues to be a limited to India only, and the fact is that it is not even spoken in whole of India. In our own nation we have half of our population (Southern India) speaks English and prefer English rather than Hindi. Let’s assume that today the government concedes to the demand of students protesting in order to snatch away the title of compulsory language to English. Now when these students go on to become IAS officers or IFS officers then surely they would be made to talk with envoys from different countries, they would be required to work as officers at various international institution like UN etc. and in various other countries, so what these officers will do when they would go to work in those countries which have English as their most-spoken language. How would these officers who are not even able to talk with people there, would lobby to get things in the favour of our nation? This is one of the most important reasons why I deem the current protest by students against the inclusion of English as a compulsory language, completely preposterous.

The other thing is that some people have jumped up in the protest by proclaiming that it’s a matter of national pride as English is threatening other Indian languages. Now let me some established fact. India is the nation having more English speaking people than anywhere in the world. While on one side when English is spoken all over the world, Hindi is not spoken completely in India only. It is good to regard our regional languages as they maintain our nation’s huge civilization but still we need to be practical. If we continue to have the same approach that we had forty-fifty decades back and we stop teaching English to our coming generation, then we would not be able to communicate with the world for ever our basic needs and that would be a serious problem. What good can our language do to us if a Tamil can’t understand a Gujarati? It is good to maintain old heritage but it is more important to change as per the demand of time therefore rather than decrying change, we should embrace it whole heartedly.
One more thing that I would like to emphasize on is that rather than blaming the students for the protest completely we should have a look at the previous government policies which are today proving to be a nightmare for the whole country. Those who are today’s applicant for the UPSC exam might have graduated from their school around 3 to 5 year ago and these people might have joined school around 15 to 16 years ago. Going into the past, we would uncover the bitter truth that at that time, at government schools, Hindi was the teaching medium and even today in most of the government schools, even science and maths books are in Hindi. When students who have been taught even maths and science in Hindi, aspire to crack IAS, English would definitely be a barrier for such students. Today just because of the unworthy policies of the previous governments, today these students are made the scapegoat while on the other hand those responsible for all the mess are hardly blamed. Even today also, NCERT maths and science books are published in Hindi and just to please the world, a slim short English literature book with difficult meaning and summary in Hindi is provided to the Hindi-medium school student. This is exactly the ground reality of the great developing India.

Today something needs to be done. Rather than blaming the students solely for all the protests, the central government needs to rectify its own policy to prevent the devastation of the upcoming generation due to such language barriers.

JAI HIND, JAI BHARAT
JAI MA BHARTI


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