Uniquely among the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China & South Africa) countries, India has a competitive advantage. Not only in the education sector, but also in the world of employment, with a potentially beneficial fallout for India’s balance of payments.

Every nation across the world is stronger, more vibrant and attractive if it is able to communicate with, trade with, and learn from best practices happening everywhere. The best way to develop advanced communication skills and competencies is to become fluent in the international language of business and education — English.

English is an associate, not the national, language of India. But most professionals know and speak it, and it is theoretically the language of instruction in much of secondary and tertiary education. English is where it’s at. Yet is India maximising and exploiting this potential advantage?

The answer to this question requires focus on three areas — the impact of English on the education sector; the impact which the education sector has on the future of Indian youth; and the impact greater engagement with education overseas might have on the Indian economy, including the country’s balance of payments.

The value of English to global education is very straightforward, and is to do with engagement. According to Unesco, English is now emerging as the language of academic communication to an extent not witnessed “since Latin dominated the academy in medieval Europe”. Academic conferences, research papers, and communication of knowledge, are all mostly happening in English. Inadequate English language skills of educators inevitably translate into risky academic research, which fails to fully engage with the international cutting edge of thinking and development.

The second focus area is the added value which would accrue to the Indian economy from improved communication skills of its graduate population. Indian students attend secondary schools and then universities in which all or much of their tuition is supposed to be in English. In practice, even where instruction is given in perfect English, an education setting in which students are passive receivers of knowledge won’t develop their interactive communication skills in international English, and workplace (aka soft) skills which they will need in later life.

The fallout of inadequately developed English language skills is the so-called ‘employability crisis’ in India. ‘Less than 10 percent of Indian MBA graduates are employable!’ screams a Wall Street Journal headline. ‘75 percent of technical graduates and more than 85 percent of general graduates are unemployable,’ says another WSJ headline.

No one is saying India isn’t producing technically competent graduates in IT, engineering, and other professional vocations. But current structures aren’t equipping young people with the interactive communication skills needed to engage fully with modern workplaces. With over 400 million youth under age 25, the need to adequately educate this massive cohort is more pressing than ever. Quite rightly, most Indians regard English competency as a necessary skill to succeed in business — as evidenced by the reality that people with good English communication skills already enjoy a 25 percent premium in India’s job market.

The final trick which India is in danger of missing out is in underestimating the value of students who travel abroad to study.

This is a significant and growing transnational market. In 2011, 4.3 million students studied abroad in countries other than where they were born. This number is double what it was in 2001, and predictions are the global population of students in higher education will rise to 25 million by 2020 in the top 50 countries, of whom 450,000 will be internationally mobile students.

What does the international higher education market look like? A few samples: 54,000 government-funded Malaysian students study abroad; Brazil aims to send 101,000 university students abroad by 2015; Saudi Arabia intends to send and fund 164,000; and China has been sending 11,000 publicly funded students overseas every year since 2007. India is an exception. The Indian government funds a mere 30 international students per year.

The value of students who study in other countries is not just significant in numbers. It’s now very significant to the economies of destination countries. The UK and US each earn around $24 billion (Rs.144,852 crore) per annum from overseas students. Therefore India’s institutions of higher education — in which English is the predominant medium of instruction — have the potential to host millions of students from other countries who could study together with 20 million local students.

Around the world, universities in non-English speaking countries are starting to offer courses in English, some to attract overseas students, and others to make their students more employable both nationally and internationally. India should maximise the potential of its English language teaching tradition in this market, thereby offering better careers and earning potential to the next generation, and simultaneously improving its balance of payments.

(Andrew Brown is the Bangalore-based programme director of Kings Learning)

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