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India is losing out from the glamour around English. Cultivate multilingual workplaces

AI can help create multilingual workforces. English isn't India’s destiny.

In India, few beliefs have travelled as far, or lodged as deeply, as the belief that English is the master key to success. It is treated as a marker of intelligence, a passport to employability, and now, in the age of artificial intelligence, as a necessity. Parents have nurtured that belief, and students have internalised it. Employers have repeated it. English has utility in global business, research, and some digital systems. A significant part of the scientific literature is generally available in English-language journals. It is therefore easy to make a sweeping conclusion that English fluency is now essential for communication, collaboration, scholarship, career advancement and national progress. That is precisely why the argument for English has become so influential. But the real question is not if English is valuable. Its utility should not be confused with inevitability. The larger issue is whether India must continue to shape aspiration and opportunity around English dependence to emerge as a productive, innovative and globally powerful nation.

Many people equate English proficiency with professionalism. That is a mistake. Professionalism means clarity, judgement, discipline, reliability and domain competence. It does not come automatically from accent, spoken competence or verbal polish. A workplace can be full of fluent English speakers and still be badly managed. Another workplace can operate in multiple languages while being highly efficient. Empirical work on multinational firms is instructive. It shows that language barriers can impede........

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