January 30, 2007 1:07PM

The Global Market for Kannadian Call Centers

By Andrew J. Coulson

"How can I help you, today, eh?" 

No, not that Canada. Kannada: the native language of 70 percent of Karnatakans.

Karnataka is the Indian state whose capital city, Bangalore, has been described as "the back office of the world." Bangalore is awash in call centers, boasts over 200 high tech companies, and is reported to have the highest number of engineering colleges of any city in the world. Bill Gates has made a promotional and recruiting trip to the city.

Bangalore's economic success rests not simply on its wealth of skilled technicians, but on their ability to work in English. There is no global market for Kannadian call centers. There is a global market for English ones.

And that's where two visions of India's educational future collide. On the one hand, we have the School Choice India campaign of the New Delhi-based Centre for Civil Society. This campaign would like to see independent schooling brought within reach of every family in India, and the overwhelming majority of non-government schools in that country teach all their classes (other than, of course, native language classes) in English. They do so because that is what their customers demand.

On the other hand we have the government of Karnataka, and the highly influential linguistic nationalists who wish to promote the use of Kannada and who see English as tainted by its association with India's colonial past. Back in 1994, the Karnatakan government passed a law -- not initially enforced -- banning English-medium schools. According to recent reports, it plans to start enforcing that ban in April of this year, under pressure from Kannadian activists, shuttering any schools that refuse to comply.

If the ban goes ahead, it will undoubtedly be short-lived, as Bangalore's businesses start making plans to relocate to other Indian cities and the full economic ramifications are more widely grasped. The fact that it is even being contemplated is just one more excellent example of why centralized control over the curriculum is a bad idea, eh.