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Indian bureaucrats scramble for Hindi dictionaries

By Nirmala George
Published June 19, 2014 7:30am ET
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Indian bureaucrats scramble for Hindi dictionaries
In this June 4, 2014 photo, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, second left in front, interacts with bureaucrats before their meeting in New Delhi, India. The top civil servants in in India's labyrinthine bureaucracy these days, are spending their evenings paging through dictionaries, frantically looking up words. The dictionary searches stem from an order by new Prime Minister Modi: All official work must now be done in Hindi, the language spoken by about 45 percent of India's 1.2 billion people. In a country with as many as 22 official languages many question Hindi's dominance. (AP Photo) | AP

NEW DELHI (AP) — For the past two weeks, the top civil servants in India’s labyrinthine bureaucracy have been sent back to school.

Graduate degrees are commonplace in this crowd. Plenty have diplomas from Oxford, Cambridge or Harvard, and most were raised speaking English — the language used in most official documents and correspondence in India.

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India World