Addressing the GDP Growth Slowdown Head On Date:   Monday , June 10, 2013 Founded in 2002, Pune based LinguaNext Technologies is a software product company in the enterprise application language management industry. Its software products enable enterprises to use state-of-the-art software such as SAP and Oracle completely in Indian languages, without any modifications to those applications. How can a country with over one billion population, most of which is young, which has a deep cultural hunger for education, and which has enterprising nature in its blood, not be able to deliver more than six percent growth? GDP, by definition is simply a measure of a country’s people’s volume of transactions among themselves. What if you had a situation where 90 percent of the population of the country was prevented from participating in any transactions above a certain minimal value – say Rs 1000? Would you then be surprised that the country’s GDP was suffering? Shocking as it may sound, that is exactly the situation we are in today. Let me explain: 90 percent of the country’s population does not speak English. Yet, for everything from a leave-and-license agreement to a vehicle loan document, we are required to operate in English. It’s no surprise therefore that people are naturally afraid to participate in such a system whose language excludes them. This has also resulted in the proliferation of alternative cash-only financial systems that remain not only off-the-books but also outside the law, causing a multitude of social problems. An argument is sometimes made that India’s progress can be attributed to the exports from the IT/ITES industry, where English has been a distinct advantage for India. The fact is that these exports only contribute about 7.5 percent of the GDP, the rest of the 92.5 percent comes from transactions between us non-English speakers only, where the use of English is strictly optional. Walk into any Indian office (including the “more foreign than thou” IT/ITES offices which sometimes feature big signboards calling people to speak in English only), and you will find people talking among themselves in Hindi or other Indian languages. Barring a very few, customers are always served in Indian languages – either over the phone or when they visit a business. However, when it comes to any form of written communication, we resort to English. While most people “get by” in this system, i.e. they are forced to trust the person who knows English (and in fact with whom they may be negotiating) it creates an environment of mistrust and reduces business activity. This problem gets only worse with pervasive computerization in all Indian businesses, government undertakings and increasingly, government departments. With this, there is simply no alternative to using English, as all state-of-the-art software such as ERP systems or CRM systems are available only in English (and perhaps many foreign languages, but never an Indian language). With such pervasiveness, the use of IT has grown from being an optional limited use tool to a necessary tool for all critical business operations. Again, to bridge the “English gap”, businesses employ intermediaries or English speakers to operate computers and get by. This not only reduces the ROI on all the software purchased by businesses, but also creates opportunity for expensive mistakes in data-entry or interpretation of the English language text. We as a country need to address this problem head on. Are we OK with a slow growth environment where we wait for future generations to become English-savvy, or do we take the bull by the horns and ensure a workable system of using Indian languages to unleash our GDP potential?