(Wl-3806)-Building Bridges through Bilingual Textbooks in India: A Suggestion for the Schooling System and Higher Education

Indian education has been plagued by the either/or of teaching in English medium or in local languages, with elite parents unwilling to let go of English, and other parents reluctant to deprive their children of good jobs earmarked for English speakers when they grow up. The result is that we have become a society not ‘firing on all cylinders’ as an overwhelming share of our demographic dividend is excluded from challenging work that is now associated with English. Bilingual textbooks would leave teachers and students free to choose the mix that suits them, going at their own pace and concentrating on understanding the lessons, rather than engaging with English as a language. To create a cadre of efficient translators students specializing in local languages will have to be steered towards careers in translation. At the moment even the publishing industry is feeling pressure from the public to bring out versions of English language books in local languages. And as most translation is routine work, much of it should be done by AI-linked machine translation, which will open up one more career path.