Ideally, and this is purely a personal IMHO, one needs to have *one* link language. English seems to do the job pretty well.
I assume you are referring here to India only. Certainly one is faced with the problem of building organizational mechanisms to deal with the problem of language when you are working in a country as linguistically diverse as India. Good organizations build good mechanisms. a. As part of Digital Green, we have worked a reasonable bit with/for farmers in India. Language is certainly a barrier/problem when it comes to working with farmers... Of course, to a first approximation, everybody in India is a farmer, and so this is a problem of major concern. To overcome this, we have incorporated translation and sub-titling in our video programs. Good organizations build good mechanisms. b. This is a policy discussion. Policy discussions can be in English. There is little harm and significant benefit. c. There is a number of English-only folks who work on India-related issues. We have approached Angus Deaton at Princeton for some of our experimental work. At the top, what organizations need is people who can talk to them on their terms. More important than knowing a non-English language is the ability for these people to have expertise in economics, statistics, programming, et cetera. We hire translators too, but what we need now are volunteer programmers. Anand :+: Linkback: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/indo-euro-americo-asian_list/message/465 P.S. Note that I am talking about what we as organizations can do. The concerns of most folks here seems to be around public policy. I will note that I have barely ever had to exercise my knowledge of Hindi in all these years. We recognize that these language problems exist, but our approach focuses on what we can do to solve these problems. --- On Mon, 7/4/11, Deepa Mohan <[email protected]> wrote: From: Deepa Mohan <[email protected]> Subject: [silk] Srivatsa Krishna: Babu is not always a four-letter word To: "Intelligent Conversation" <[email protected]>, "raji hari" <[email protected]>, "Nayantara office id" <[email protected]> Date: Monday, July 4, 2011, 2:38 PM There are two things that really bother me about this video (and in general) and that is a) the fact that very often, such people are only preaching to the converted...and b) that to be heard (especially on the net) one needs to be proficient in English. I am sure we have honest "babus" and others, who are not good at English...how will their voices be heard, especially by the urban English-is-practically-my-mother-tongue (I include myself in this) category? And how do we solve the gigantic problem of the category of "babu" who truly makes it a four-letter word, as Srivatsa Krishna says? How many people do we have on this list who are from the IAS? http://bit.ly/mRP5EE
