With Afghanistan ranking high on India’s agenda, the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) has for the first time introduced Pashto as one of the foreign languages for new members of the Indian Foreign Service (IFS).
The decision to introduce Pashto as a foreign language for the IFS officers of the 2010 batch, who are ready for posting was done in view of New Delhi’s massive engagements — ranging from political to the its whopping development assistance package of $2 billion — in the war-ravaged South Asian nation.
“It shows that we have a long term commitment to Afghanistan, that we are investing in a probation officer to learn the language. It will obviously help smoothen our interaction with the local populace and give the right signal, who are the target of our projects,” said a senior MEA official.
All IFS officers on probation are assigned a compulsory foreign language (CFL), which is chosen on the basis of their merit ranking in the batch.
For members of the 2010 batch, which has completed their training at the Foreign Service Institute and are ready for the language training, they had a list of 16 foreign languages to choose from.
Interestingly, the introduction of new languages is the outcome of the larger intake for the IFS. Following a Cabinet decision in 2008, the IFS batches have increased dramatically in size from 24 in 2009 to 40 in 2012.
The permanent languages always on offer to new IFS recruits are Arabic, Chinese, French, Spanish and Russian, which are the official languages of the United Nations as well.
“Earlier, due to the smaller number of batch size, the more unusual languages used to come at a rotation of five years. Now due to larger batch size, they can be offered every alternate year,” said a senior official.
Besides the big five, the other languages on offer this year included German, Japanese, Portugese, Korean and more exotic offerings like Bhasha Indonesia, Burmese, Turkish, Sinhalese and Hebrew.
Pashto, the lingua franca of about 60 million in Afghanistan and Pakistan, made it to the compulsory foreign language list for the first time.