Vehicle For Communication

In the last couple of weeks, there had been news articles of two engineering students ending their lives. The reason stated is that, the two students were unable to cope up with their curriculum.  What make these incidents even more heart rending is the fact that the students ended their life not because they could not cope up with the demands of the course but they could not follow the content of the lectures and text books as the medium of instruction was in English. As a result, they had accumulated a number of arrears over a period of time. With the boom of the IT/ITes sectors in India, the knowledge of English has become inevitable. One of the top criteria that define employability of engineering graduates in these sectors is fluency of the English language. The job profiles require employees to converse with clients in unknown lands. There is no harm in studying subjects in the mother tongue. In my long stint with the IT sector, i have seen students who have done their entire schooling in Tamil medium and engineering in reputed colleges with subjects taught in English, but have done extremely well in college and at the workplace. There are also people who have picked up the language of English so well over years, though they are from a rural background and have done their schooling in Tamil Medium.
To an extent, it’s soothing to hear that some of the branches of engineering are being offered now in Tamil. A welcome Initiative. China, Japan & Russia are some examples that hoist their flag high in the IT arena in spite of their population not being very conversant in English. The major problem as i understand with our setup is that there are no standards that are used to translate many of the technical terms used in engineering to and equivalent  in the vernacular. Students are left in a lurch using these terms when it comes to examinations.
To make things better for such students, there has to be a dictionary which translates the technical terms into an equivalent in Tamil. This dictionary has to be updated regularly and should be made available for students as a free download. This will weed out any possible confusions in the usage of such technical terms. Coming to the point of gaining fluency in English, all students in school taking up their studies in Tamil medium have to be given coaching in spoken English. This effort can start as early as, when the students are in the seventh or eighth standard. This can be done after regular school hours, for two or three hours a week. This will go a long way in giving them an opportunity to face the employment world with much more confidence. Language is a vehicle for communication. It should not be allowed to become a vehicle that takes the life of students.