English / Vernacular Medium Apartheid in South Asia

Worst victim of the unholy divide is the public education system, particularly in North India & Pakistan, where on one hand, the ruling elite have deliberately kept Hindi and Urdu -and all other regional languages- fossilized in the name of faux nationalism and on the other, created 'several' parallel English-medium schooling systems that ensure that the best positions always go to the elite, middle order to middle-class and only lower level to Hindi/Urdu medium masses..

Any attempts at reform and modernization are always frowned upon, with zealots going as far as denouncing any efforts as anti-national and thus Hindi and Urdu are condemned to remain forever stunted and identified with social and economic backwardness. The hegemony is so pervasive that even private initiatives, where there can be no establishment influence are marred by linguistic chauvinism of Hindi and Urdu zealots. Hindi and Urdu Wikipedias are live evidence of what is being done with Hindi and Urdu, both use some alien language that nobody speaks! being a voluntary undertaking, Wikipedia relies on the good sense of the language community. in case of Hindi and Urdu, the conditioning has been so effective that the very people that should be changing things have self-appointed themselves as defenders of status-quo. What good is an encyclopedia if no one can understand it? The same thing that happened to our text books is now happening to open-source, both Hindi and Urdu Wikipedias are largely advertising the 'Official Story' instead of dispassionate objective truth that is the Wiki standard. This is like an absolute mockery of the open-knowledge idea!