The English language and India146;s working population

English is being spread in India by the world of work. And, most interestingly, young India is gearing up to meet the challenge of English. ...

English is being spread in India by the world of work. And, most interestingly, young India is gearing up to meet the challenge of English. An analysis by The Indian Express of the Indian Retirement Earnings and Savings IRES shows that nearly 40 percent of young earners 8212; in the age group 20 to 308212; have at least a rudimentary ability to read English.

8226; How widespread is the use of English in India?

About 35 percent of the earners of India claim that they can 8220;read8221; English. A note of caution must be added: all measurement of literacy is weak. A man who claims to read English can probably slowly read one letter at a time.

8226; How do we know about this data?

One good source is the Indian Retirement Earnings and Savings IRES database, released by the Ministry of Finance and ADB. This tells us about a randomly chosen set of 41,000 earners in the country. The focus is on earners 8211; people who do not work for an income are not counted. There are 364 million earners, so each 1 of the earners is 3.64 million people.

8226; What does IRES tell us about Hindi and English?

It shows a fascinating pattern figure 1

In the case of Hindi, more people say they can speak but not read 8211; this probably reflects a great prevalence of Bollywood-quality Hindi. In the case of English, it is upside down: Only 16.5 people are confident enough to speak, but 35 can read 8211; this probably reflects English picked up at school and college. These are big numbers 8212; one-third of the 364 million earners of India is 120 million. To be precise, 35 of 364 mill in is 127.4 million or 12.74 crore.

8226; What is the situation on literacy, in any language?

If we look for people who can read in either a local language, Hindi or English, we find that 76.5 of the earners of India are literate.

8226; How does reading English or Hindi vary by age?

If we look at age 50-60, where 12 of the earners are to be found, roughly half of them can read Hindi but only one-third can read English.

Young people are more likely to know English. In the 20-30 age group, where a quarter of India8217;s earners are found, those who can read English are 10 out of 25. Hindi readers are a bit bigger at 14. So English is more prevalent in the 20-30 cohort as compared with the 50-60 cohort.

8226; How does reading English or Hindi vary by income class?

A rough definition that might be useful is to break India into three groups: 8220;Poor8221;, 8220;Middle Class8221; and 8220;Upper class8221;. We classify the bottom 15 as poor 8211; these prove to earn below Rs.14,000 a year. We classify the top 15 as rich 8211; these prove to earn above Rs.85,000 a year. The in-between, the 70 of individuals earning between Rs.14,000 a year and Rs.85,000 a year, we classify as 8220;Middle Class8221;.

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The picture that we get for Hindi and English, broken-down by class:

This shows that out of the 15 of the upper class, 11 read Hindi and 10 read English. Similarly, out of the 15 of the poor, 8 read Hindi and 2 read English. Roughly speaking, we may say that English and Hindi are neck to neck when it comes to the upper class. Each language is known to roughly two-thirds of this group.