Science and Hindi

There is a parliamentary committee which looks after the promotion of the national language. Every now and then it visits some central government office (or a national institution like ours) and issues dicta about how much Hindi should be used in daily work and how much Hindi all employees must learn.

Today I heard a funny outcome of this. Every departmental head at our institute must issue at least five notices a month in Hindi, without an accompanying English translation. This includes the scientific departments as well. So in order to be a scientist, it is not enough to know the science or to be able to do research in it, but one has to learn a language different from one’s own, and different from the one used in research.

No wonder progress in science is so slow in India.

Update: The requirement of five notices seems to have been reduced to three.

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