India may be dismantling one of the most important pillars of its Engineering education: English communication training. Faculty members who once taught credit-bearing English courses — four credits, semester-examined, mapped to programme outcomes — now find their subjects reduced to single-credit modules across India in both affiliated and autonomous institutions. It is largely anecdotal so far, reported more in corridor conversations than in official circulars. But these scattered signals appear against a broader policy backdrop that gives them coherence.
The National Education Policy (NEP) 2020, in its sweeping reimagining of Indian education, strongly emphasises multilingualism and the role of Indian language. Yet, it does not explicitly foreground English communication as a core competency in higher education. But there is a difference between adding languages and removing a working one. Within this context, institutional shifts take on added significance.
Across technical institutions in India, English courses have been quietly downgraded — from four-credit standalone subjects to two-credit or one-credit modules tucked into the curriculum’s margins. This is not merely an administrative adjustment; it reflects a deeper recalibration of how technical education values language. Even colleges that built their identity around English are not immune. B.A. English programmes are being discontinued, not because of policy, but because students are just not enrolling. English in Indian higher education is now sustained because classrooms still teach in English, and not because anyone is fighting for English itself. This is a mistake India will pay for dearly.
English in Indian higher education is not a colonial relic. It the language of the semiconductor, the syntax of the algorithm, and the dialect of global research. Every scientific journal that matters and every technological breakthrough worth studying is published in English. When we strip credit from English courses, we do not merely downgrade a subject, but we send a signal to students that it is dispensable. And students, ever rational about where to invest their effort, will treat it accordingly.
The industry’s impatience is understandable but dangerously short-sighted. Employers ask one question: how fast can this recruit start coding? From that lens, an English course looks like a non-billable luxury. But a brilliant coder who cannot explain his/her logic to a client becomes a bottleneck. A mechanical engineer who cannot write a clear safety report becomes a liability. Projects are delayed not because of bad code but because of misinterpreted requirements. Innovation dies when engineers cannot defend their ideas in global meetings. Prompt Engineering relies heavily on linguistic precision; poor syntax or ambiguity in English leads to suboptimal outputs from LLMs, which are primarily trained on English datasets. English is not “extra”; it is the infrastructure upon which technical work is built, communicated, and sold. When we treat it as a low-return module, we are building a glass ceiling for our graduates.
The real problem is not whether to teach English, but how to teach it. Employers are not wrong to recoil from archaic grammar drills and poetry analysis disconnected from any professional context. But the solution is to fix the curriculum, not abandon the course. What India’s universities need is a decisive shift toward functional fluency; for communication to be taught as a workplace competency, not a literary exercise.
A redesigned English curriculum could replace Shakespearean sonnets with technical report writing, teach students to argue a design choice, write a precise AI prompt, or lead a project meeting. In the era of large language models, the ability to describe a problem with linguistic clarity is itself a technical skill. Teach the discipline of brevity: saying something meaningful in 100 words demands the same cognitive muscle required for executive summaries and investor pitches. These are not soft skills; they are power tools for the modern economy.
There is also a social justice dimension this quiet restructuring ignores. For the urban student, English is atmospheric; absorbed from birth and reinforced at home. But for a student from a Tamil-medium or a Hindi-medium school, the professional English semester is a lifeline. It is the only structured bridge between local talent and global opportunity. To hollow out these courses under the guise of curriculum efficiency is to build a two-tier system: those who can communicate their talent, and those whose talent remains trapped behind a language barrier. We would be pulling the ladder from under those who need it most. Thus, what is happening quietly in our universities is not reform. It is a retreat that we cannot afford.
The writer is an Assistant Professor of English, specialising in Communication and Language Studies, at Velammal Engineering College, Chennai.