Hindi Shall Grow Globally

New Fortunes for Hindi
By Vinod Varshney

Hindi has started earning new fortunes. Whether it is China, Russia or the US, any country which wants to do serious business with India considers Hindi strategically important. No wonder then special programs of learning Hindi have started in the largest and the second largest economies of the world i.e. the US and China.

In the cold war era the USSR had showed immense love for Hindi, but after the Nine Eleven terrorist attack, the US listed Hindi as a crucial language for America. The Republican President George Bush further upgraded its need and had once declared his government's intention to recruit Hindi teachers.

Now we hear that highly reputed Wharton School of Business is starting a joint degree program in international management, the MBA/MA Lauder Program, which would give students a chance to learn Hindi. In fact Hindi would be one option out of nine important world language including Arabic, Chinese, French, German, Japanese, Portuguese, Russian, and Spanish.

This MBA/MA program is designed to prepare future business leaders of international grade. Students mindful of the fact that economy of India is going to be third largest in the world within next two decades would certainly realize the utility of learning Hindi. The program will emphasize cross-cultural and advanced-level language training. 
Hindi is Spoken in America

Hindi is not an unspoken language in America.Thanks to a very large number of Indians in America, there is a good number of Hindi speakers as well. The 2000 census showed that there were 317,057 Hindi speakers in the United States. We would have to wait for the outcome of the 2010 US census, but it is estimated that their number must have reached to half a million by now. In 2006, 1,946 higher education students were studying Hindi and pretty large number of students studying it in grades K-12.

Though craze for English is increasing in India but nobody can ignore the fact that within India more than half a billion people speak Hindi and as many as 800 million people understand Hindi.

Hindi can be learnt very fast if proper IT tools are developed, but inspite of India imparting IT enabled services to so many countries, Hindi has not been able to attract sufficiently the Information Technology for its advancement. Programs of the Ministry of Information Technology are too inadequate.