English-Medium Schooling Is an Export Pipeline

One of the things the Northeast is quietly proud of is its English. In Nagaland, English is the official language; across Mizoram, Meghalaya, and much of the region, decades of mission schooling left behind a fluency that outstrips most of India. It's routinely listed as one of the region's great competitive assets — the key, everyone says, that unlocks the global economy for Northeastern youth. That's true. It's just worth asking which direction the key turns.

Because fluency in a global language is an asset for participating in a global economy — and if that economy is everywhere except home, then the asset is, functionally, a departure lounge. Good English makes a young person from Kohima employable in Bangalore, Delhi, Dubai, or a call centre serving customers on another continent. What it does not do, on its own, is give them a reason to deploy that fluency in Kohima. The same skill that opens the world also lubricates the exit, and a region that produces English speakers faster than it produces English-speaking jobs has built a very efficient pipeline for sending its best-prepared people somewhere else.

This is the uncomfortable shape of a lot of the region's "human capital" — education systems tuned to select and polish talent, bolted onto an economy that can't absorb it, so the polishing just raises the resale value elsewhere. The better the school, the smoother the export. It's brain drain wearing a school uniform, and it's celebrated at every graduation precisely because we've been trained to read individual mobility as unambiguous success and never to ask what it costs the place left behind.

The correction, though, has to avoid a genuinely poisonous conclusion — that the region should somehow teach less English to keep people home. That's monstrous, the educational equivalent of clipping wings, and it punishes the young for the failures of the economy around them. Fluency is a gift and should stay one. The problem was never the skill; it's the absence of anywhere local worth spending it.

So the fix runs the other way. An asset that currently only pays off abroad has to be given somewhere to pay off at home: industries that need English-speaking talent — services, tourism, remote-first companies headquartered locally, creative and knowledge work — so that fluency becomes a reason to stay rather than a passport to leave. Right now the region trains its people beautifully for a race that starts at the airport. The trick is to move the finish line back home.