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Effect Of English Speaking Population

According to a survey conducted by Harvard University in 2005, India had English speaking population of over 350 million which is more than the combined population of US and UK. Where as in China, it is around 250 million.
This English speaking population helps India in mainly IT and ITES industry. Today, more number of BPOs and IT companies are coming to establish their operations in our country because of this additional benefit. But if we want to attract more number of FDI in this sector, we require to concentrate on technical skills too. In recent times, NASSCOM's Head, Kiran Karnik, and Infosys' Head, Narayan Murty, said that only 33% of engineers produced by Indian engineering colleges are well equipped with knowledge, rest 65% are struggling with their technical and language skills, So to avoid this ill-effect, Indian universities are required to tie-up with industry and make their syllabus according to the industrial needs which helps students and industry to improve its productivity and growth.

Conclusion

Although China has enjoyed a demographic dividend over India for past few decades, in the future, the demographic trends will change and will be more favorable towards India. Specially, India will enjoy more working age population than China in near future, which will help in part in the relative rapid growth of India as compared to China. The following graph shows the marginal change in the GDP of India and China based on the projected data from Goldman Sach's report.

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* Contributed by: -
Manvendra Pratap Singh & Vishal Narlawar,
MBA (majoring in Marketing),
ICFAI Business School, Hyderabad.