Anoop Kumar had three minutes to make a speech about the ‘importance of English’. He knew what he’d be saying; he had rehearsed it word by word for days. ‘It is a global language – 400 million people in the world speak it,’ the young man began. ‘It opens a world of new opportunity. It increases your chance of getting a job at a multinational company. It will help you in travel if you have to go to another country for a job,’ he continued, stressing every word. The English language, he said, is the key to progress. ‘Making progress feels great,’ he finished, drawing applause from his 50 fellow students at a coaching centre for spoken English.
Twenty-four-year-old Kumar has made a lot of progress in the past 10 years, but he is still waiting for that feeling. In 2012, he left his village, Kanhachatti, in eastern Jharkhand, one of India’s poorest states. He moved to the state’s capital, Ranchi, which seemed to him a place of unlimited promise at that time. He had made it to one of India’s best colleges for technical education based in the city, the Birla Institute of Technology. He studied the subject guaranteed to bring success in today’s India: software engineering. Then he began looking for a job in India’s $160-billion information technology industry.
