The English Tax

India’s colonial hangover and corporate impatience are shrinking its talent pool by confusing fluency with merit.

Earlier this week, a leading Indian IT firm announced it would increase vendor bonuses to accelerate “quality hiring.” It’s a familiar move: companies, under pressure to execute fast, throw money at speed. But beneath this urgency lies a deeper problem that’s particularly acute in India’s job market.

What does ‘quality’ mean? The term itself is subjective. In hiring, it often serves as shorthand for attributes that are easy to spot but hard to define - communication skills being one of the most frequently cited. While quality should also include technical proficiency and/or cultural fit, for clarity’s sake let’s limit this discussion to communication - a global skill that’s increasingly central in an AI-driven, services-led economy.

Communication matters! But how we define and evaluate communication in India reveals a layered contradiction shaped by colonial history, social hierarchy, and market pressures.

For years, corporate India has complained that candidates lack strong communication skills. But what’s being said is this: they don’t speak English the way we expect them to. This has little to do with intelligence or clarity of thought but everything to do with class-coded fluency - accent, articulation and confidence.

We confuse polish with potential. A brilliant candidate from a small town, fluent in regional languages and technically sound, might be rejected for lacking verbal fluency in English. Meanwhile, a less competent candidate who presents well in corporate English is considered “client-ready.” The result is a hiring ecosystem that values conformity over capability.

This bias is structural. During colonial rule, the education system was designed to create an elite class fluent in English and trained to serve the empire. Post-independence India inherited this model wholesale. The emphasis on English as a medium of instruction wasn’t about empowerment but filtering. That filter persists today, silently sorting job candidates based on presentation rather than potential.

And nowhere is this more ironic than in the current language debate across India, where the controversy is more on the streets than in the Boardroom. As India debates linguistic identity through movements against Hindi imposition and regional pride in local languages, English continues to dominate where it matters most: education and employment.

There is a loud political defence of linguistic diversity, but in corporate settings, English remains the default currency of competence. It’s not enough to be understood - you must sound “global.” This silent expectation widens the gap between skilled candidates and job opportunities, particularly for those outside urban, English-medium ecosystems. We celebrate multilingualism culturally but penalize it economically. That contradiction undermines the very idea of inclusive growth. A society that claims pride in its linguistic heritage must ask why are we still measuring intelligence through the lens of one language?

This brings us back to the hiring rush. In a capitalistic system, and especially in an AI-disrupted world, speed has become the dominant metric. Companies want candidates who are not just ready but “ready now.” Bonuses are offered to vendors not just to find the right candidate but to find them quickly.

Speed is not a strategy. A small fraction of the workforce can independently upskill, self-train, and master corporate English without institutional support. Yet companies chase this narrow pool - a practice that is neither smart nor sustainable. Patience is treated as ‘inefficiency’ in an economy obsessed with readiness.

Incentivising ‘quality hiring’ is futile if quality remains ill-defined. If communication is the metric, firms must ask what kind truly drives performance and not merely what sounds polished in interviews. Are we rewarding clarity or just fluency? Are we building diverse teams or repackaging the same pipeline with slicker tools?

Often, quality means someone who not only has the technical skills but also communicates flawlessly, demonstrates emotional intelligence, collaborates without friction, shows initiative, adapts instantly, and never ruffles feathers. In other words, someone who can walk on water!

This impossible ideal becomes the baseline. And the more we chase it, the more we overlook real people who might need time to grow or just one manager who believes in them.

Can vendor bonuses tied to ‘quality hiring’ work when quality is so elastic and so unrealistic? Perhaps they’ll plug short-term gaps. But they won’t fix the deeper problem: an unwillingness to invest in human potential while waiting for mythical perfection to arrive ready-made.

In a country rich with linguistic, cultural and intellectual diversity, the real opportunity is not in filtering faster; it is in recognizing better.

(The writer is learning and development professional. Views personal.)