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MACAULAY'S CHILDREN
By INDIA TODAY Principle Correspondent Farah Baria.

Rain, rain do not fail,
Paper boats we want to sail,
Rain, rain come again!

Okay, okay. The metre's all wrong. Not exactly the Queen's English. Certainly not that familiar rhyme about little Johnny yearning to play in a dreary London drizzle. But in a country where six-year-old children trudge 10 km to fetch a pail of water and the entire economy depends on the annual downpour, this modified Indian version is, well, comme il faut.

Actually it's only one of the delightfully desi ditties in My English, a primer that will be introduced to four crore students in 60,000 primary schools in Maharashtra. Illustrations are likewise. 'Baa Baa Black Sheep' shows a turbaned Maharashtrian shepherd with his wife in a traditional nine-yard saree. And 'Mary's little lamb' is now 'Meera's little cat'. "The idea is to make English more meaningful in the Indian context," says Sunita Kokardekar, member of the Education Board's Curriculum Committee for English in Pune.

Reason? The Maharashtra Government has decreed that English will be a compulsory subject from this academic year. Predictably, there were shrill protests. Shiv Sena supremo Bal Thackeray warned that Marathi was in danger of dying out and ordered shopkeepers to rewrite their signs in the local language. The unofficial edict, however, has been studiously ignored. Even
Thackeray's grandchildren go to English convent schools.

"Fortunately, pragmatism prevailed," says Ramkrishna More, minister for school education. "After all we can't allow our children to be left behind in this age of information technology." Now over 1.5 lakh primary-school teachers from all over the state are being trained for the programme.

The decision is probably a fait accompli. In Mumbai, the recent past has seen a minor exodus from vernacular schools to English-medium ones. Last year, over 150 Marathi schools were forced to shut down while over 430 new English schools sprang up. "More and more parents are plucking their children out of regional language institutes and begging us for admission," confides a teacher at south Mumbai's Holy Name School.

This year, T. Anna, a government hospital nurse, forked out Rs 8,000 to admit her four-year-old son to a suburban English primary. Her husband, a Class III municipal worker, was adamant that their son should not 'waste his time' learning Marathi. Even prestigious schools like the Parle Tilak Vidyalaya, Mumbai's Marathi Eton, and Bal Mohan at Shivaji Park, the city's
Maharashtrian bastion, have been forced to open English-medium sections.

But the trend is not restricted to the Great Urban Middle Class. After the Latur earthquake, ngos, which sought to resurrect the local shalas, were taken aback when residents demanded that the new schools teach only English. Akluj, near Sholapur, has no hospital and only a couple of concrete roads, but the hub of the settlement is an English-medium boarding school. And in Akola, near Nagpur, every kerbside has an English class preparing college students for computer courses.

Back in Mumbai, Leela Lal, managing director of the British Institutes, can barely cope with the flood of students queuing up for English courses. The institute also offers correspondence BBC courses in spoken English that cost between Rs 500 and Rs 3,000. In spite of the course fees, over 3,000 BBC course packages have been sold since January. No one wants to be left
behind, not if they can help it.

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