The choice of language is the choice of culture. We can’t sustain foreign languages and indigenous cultures simultaneously.
— Alok Singh

We have been struggling since 1835 to regain our education system legacy. As time passed, the attack on our education system became brutal. Today, the situation is more alarming and dangerous than it was in 1835. From Macaulay to Artificial Intelligence (AI), we have generally failed as policymakers and as a society to revive our education system.

The 1835 Macaulay education policy, as outlined in its “Minutes on Indian Education System,” emphasized English as the medium of instruction and Western thought as the foundation of the educated mind. It is well summarized as” Indian by blood, and English by taste.” The tools engaged were scaling up and financial support to this cause. The scaling-up procedure involved educating a select group of Indians, who would, in turn, train the broader Indian population. They will transfer whatever they have learned. Those who have learned English and Western thought will disseminate it to the masses, thereby scaling up the influence of English and Western thought. Financial support was available to any educational institution that aligned with this agenda. The tools of financial support are active today. It is active within the academic institutions of the country as well as abroad. 

Post-independence, policymakers in the education sector didn’t make any strategic changes. Nor did they have any blueprint to reimpart our original education system. 

The language emerged as a powerful tool, but it became entangled in the realm of power politics. Language as a tool for politics is so powerful that it resulted in the creation of a separate country, Bangladesh. Language as a political tool is more powerful than religion. And Macaulay knew it about 150 years before the creation of Bangladesh. It reflects how poorly our policymakers in the education sector performed after independence. 

After seventy-five years of independence, we did get a National Education Policy (NEP) that focused on language. But today, society is responding poorly.  This is reflected in the fact that there are no takers for admission to a Hindi-medium medical college in Madhya Pradesh.

The Chinese could save themselves, but we couldn’t. If we examine our original countrywide accepted official language, i.e., Sanskrit, it is also under the influence of foreign powers. It’s not about Friedrich Max MüllerMüller today, but it’s about Harvard and Princeton today. It’s not only about the foreign funding today, but it’s about our money funding Sanskrit chair professors in elite Western universities. 

Sanskrit, Harvard, and Indigenous business houses funding foreign universities reflect the state of our mindset. It trickles down to our society and parents’ unwillingness to impart education to their wards in their regional language. During the Vijayadashami celebration, Sarsanghachalak Dr. Mohan Bhagwat Ji expressed concerns that policymakers have done their job by implementing the NEP after a detailed stakeholder consultation spread over multiple years. Still, the parents are not ready for this change. 

Today, policymakers are ready, but society is not. The elite business houses have joined hands with elite foreign universities that are digesting our knowledge system using our own Sanskrit. We are in a trap.

Elite foreign universities receive funding from our business houses for promoting Sanskrit. They conduct due diligence and later demean our knowledge system, positioning their knowledge system above ours—our money funding our cultural decline.

Max Muller conducted an extensive study on Sanskrit and Indology to critique our system, i.e., our knowledge system, using our language as an offensive tool and establishing English as a defensive tool for a better future for our society. Our society and business houses are still reeling from that conspiracy. The Chinese business houses also funded Chinese language chair professors at elite Western universities but didn’t allow them to demean their language and knowledge system.

We are struggling with the conspiracies of Macaulay and Max Mullerto date. NEP arrived to rescue us. The schools and colleges are preparing themselves. The government established the Rashtriya Bhasha Samiti to accelerate the implementation in regional languages. And suddenly, we find ourselves surrounded by the teeth of the AI sword.

AI is something that can democratize processes wherever it is engaged, apart from its core functionality of replacing human efforts. It aims to replace human efforts that are not necessarily repetitive. AI can think more effectively than the average human intelligence. 

The 2025 tools of AI have emerged as a challenge to our education system. Academicians are concerned about whether assignments, research papers, and articles submitted for evaluation or consumption by regular audiences are written by an author whose name is printed or AI-generated, camouflaged under a human name. 

AI can even do an illiterate doctorate if AI is engaged from start to end in the education supply chain, spanning from preschool to universities. The massive crowd of students aspiring to higher degrees and those masking  in AI is a deadly combination. 

Our policymakers are struggling to regulate personal data, the dependency on foreign data centers is enormous, and now our education system is vulnerable to AI. Before the advent of AI, our education system was also churning out unemployable engineers. On multiple occasions, our elite institutions have been labeled as strong forts with a weak army. These statements can be generalized, but at the same time, we must respect and trust those individuals who, in this toxic academic environment, have protected their character and credibility and are working for the nation’s interest.

The path ahead is that policymakers should regulate AI heavily in the education sector, the society should believe in NEP and participate actively to promote education in regional language, and our business houses, whether elite or struggling, should spend their money on funding our knowledge system. The choice of language is the choice of culture. We can’t sustain foreign languages and indigenous cultures simultaneously.

Our institutions of national importance, like AIIMS, IITs, IIMs, and others, are spread across the country. They can design a few courses in regional languages to cater to the needs of regional students in their geographical location. 

(Alok Singh has a doctorate in management from the Indian Institute of Management Indore and promoter of Transition Research Consultancy for Policy and Management.)