Sri Lanka's 1956 Sinhala Only Act overnight did away with English as a medium of instruction. English-medium schools shut down and unemployed teachers in their hundreds packed up and left the country to go where they were more wanted. Meanwhile, what happened in Sri Lanka?

After two years of protests by Tamil leaders, Tamil was also admitted as a language of instruction. Since then, at least two generations of Sri Lankans have been educated compulsorily in swabhasha, their mother tongue. Today, as the world prepares to step into the 21st century, these Sri Lankans are looking back in anger and demanding that the system be changed so that future generations will not bevictimised at the altar of a policy that arose out of sheer political expediency.

Sinhala Only was a ploy to minimise the stranglehold of Tamils in education and employment. Leave aside for the moment the effects of this policy on the country's ethnic conflict. Those, and the role of English as the bridge language between the two communities, are arguable. But what is unarguable is this: English did not disappear from Sri Lanka. It became the language of the rich, of those who could afford to attend "international" schools, the only kind where English is permitted as a medium of instruction.

For the rest, it is swabhasha. When these children step out after 16 or 18 years into the real world, they find life revolves around science, medicine, law, economy and, of course, information technology and communication skills. Unfortunately, unlike in their schools, all of this is in English and they find themselves unequipped for it.

Naturally, their more affluent peers Tamil or Sinhalese who attendedinternational schools have no problems securing well-paying jobs or seats in the best universities in England or the US or India. By contrast, swabhasha-educated school leavers cannot dream of even applying to a university abroad. Even for admission to a Sri Lankan university, they must undergo a six-month course in the English language to enable them to consult reference books.

Yes, English is supposed to be taught as a subject, just as it is being proposed by the Tamil Nadu government now, but how many who have studied a second language in school can claim to remember even some of it, let alone work in it? The divide became so sharp that in the 70s university slang, English was described as kaduwa, Sinhalese for sword, a weapon with which the rich cut down the poor. In fact, the language policy and its effect on employment is one of the reasons that anlaysts have forwarded for the 1971 armed insurrection by the Janatha Vimukthi Perumina (JVP), which had in its ranks thousands of educatedunemployed. Today, Sri Lankan youth are resorting to more practical measures. There is now a flourishing English-teaching industry.

Information technology specialists here say there are thousands of vacancies in the industry that cannot be filled because they do not have sufficient trained manpower. One of the first stumbling blocks to training: lack of English.

There are valuable lessons in this for minister M. Tamizhkudimagan and others who are screaming for a return to Tamil in Tamil Nadu. And the first is to accept that English is now a world language, the lingua franca of the global village. Learn it and be part of the village or shun it and get left out.

The other is that there is more premium in making English available to as many as possible. That is also the only way to de-elitise it. Depriving some of the opportunity to learn it will only be to the advantage of a section of society that will always have English or have the resources to learn it, regardless of the government policy.