Written by Neeraj Mehra.
Image credit: Multiple Indian Students Awarded Scholarships to Study in Taiwan (2024) by Central News Agency (CNA) and Overseas Community Affairs Council, Taiwan.
An unusual facet of India-Taiwan relations is quietly going on without the world knowing about it. As one of the most technically advanced economies in the world, Taiwan has a semiconductor industry that the world relies on and is actively, generously and structurally investing in attracting Indian talent to its fold. The funding for the scholarships has been secured. The programmes are planned. The doors are open. But something has been missing to make this relationship become a lasting and deep people-to-people partnership.
Applications are growing. Interest is real. There is, however, a particular and intractable divide at the heart of this relationship: a language divide that neither policy nor enthusiasm on the part of the teacher or the student can solve. Taiwan’s companies are really in dire need of Mandarin-able talent. India (1.4 billion people), a young population, and one of the highest numbers of engineering and science graduates in the world, generates almost none.
To comprehend the reason for that gap, and why it persists even as Taiwan’s scholarship system has been made more generous every year, one must look beyond the policy itself. It calls for a consideration of culture, psychology, and the ways in which Indian students think about language, time, and return on investment.
What Taiwan Is Actually Offering
It’s worth saying that Taiwan’s government has built one of the more comprehensive scholarship ecosystems available for Indian students today.
The MOE Taiwan Scholarship, sponsored by the Ministry of Education, Taiwan, is one of the most comprehensive and all-inclusive scholarship programmes offered to Indian students today. It includes full tuition, a monthly living stipend and is available to undergraduate, master’s, and doctoral applicants across a variety of disciplines.
The ICDF Scholarship, which operates through the International Cooperation and Development Fund, is an even more generous programme for tuition, living allowances, health insurance, and return airfare. The overall structure of the ICDF’s scholarships is based on the Taiwanese belief of strategic investment rather than charity for talent development.
The MOFA Fellowship is somewhat different, however, and is run by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. It is shorter in duration and more professionally oriented, focusing on mid-career individuals. It aims at creating a network of human beings who can maintain a long-term bilateral relationship to build real bridges between the two countries.
The Huayu Enrichment Scholarship, also sponsored by MOE, is perhaps the most obvious programme related to this discussion. This is not a degree or fellowship programme, but was specially created with a single goal in mind: to fund the Mandarin language trip. It is available for three to twelve months. Once accepted, the student receives admission to a Mandarin language centre, a monthly allowance, and is required to come to the centre to learn Mandarin.
In addition to these flagship initiatives, Taiwan’s universities provide institutional scholarships, research grants, and departmental fellowships, some specifically offered to South Asian students and many linked to the technology sectors in which India has public development efforts underway. In sum, the infrastructure isn’t the issue. It is vast, available, and, by any objective measure, underused.
The Language Nobody Is Learning
The question is simple: How many Indians can speak functional Mandarin? Not in the tourist dictionary sense of the word. Not the “I can say hello and count to ten” variety. The practical variety: to be able to sit in a meeting and read a technical report, to read a contract, to negotiate a contract, and to manage a supplier relationship in Mandarin.
The figure is very small. And this is a startling fact when you consider India’s geography. India shares the world’s most contested land border with China. It is one of the closest large economies to the Mandarin-speaking world. And yet, functionally, it might as well be on the other side of the planet when it comes to the language. It’s not a political matter. It’s just that Mandarin was never a part of India’s linguistic imagination.
The Mandarin Marathon and Sprint Culture.
It’s here that the bigger issue starts. Indian students are overall very disciplined students. The preparation culture which produces JEE toppers, UPSC rankers and CAT percentile makers is really extraordinary in its depth. But, it’s all about the sprint, which is a focused and intense effort for a definite finish line! Hard work, pass the exam and move on. It is a system based on reward, for speed, for pressure, for constraint.
This will not work with Mandarin. Two thousand hours of continuous learning are required to be competent enough to work in a Taiwanese business as an Indian graduate. It’s not two thousand hours of studying for a test but slow, patient, oftentimes frustrating accumulation: reading, listening, speaking, failure, and repeat.
Most Indian students are disoriented when they study Mandarin seriously for 4 or 5 months. They have memorised hundreds of characters. However, they are unable to follow a simple TV conversation. It is at this time that the urge to just give up is too strong. Not because students are lazy, but because they were not exposed to any structures in their learning that would be conducive to the slower, non-linear development of learning a language.
This lack of patience is not a fault of character. It is a product developed without concern for process or depth, just speed. In fact, it is arguably the major practical challenge for an Indian student in a promising career in Taiwan.
The Invisible Return
The second, related, structural issue is exacerbated by the return on learning Mandarin, which is pretty much imperceptible in the Indian domestic economy.
This makes it very hard for a 20-year-old student from a middle-class family to calculate. The amount of time and effort they’ve spent on a difficult language for a job in Taiwan and a company they’ve never heard of before, in a country most of their peers have not been to, is extremely high. The path on Taiwan-Mandarin is lonely and speculative, even though the programmes that sponsor it are among the most generous in the world.
Until Indian students can see, in sufficient numbers and with sufficient clarity, people who took this path and came out the other side with meaningful careers, the return on investment calculation will remain unfavourable in the imagination of most applicants.
The English Illusion
There’s one more layer, and it might be the biggest. Indian students have seen the ability to speak English as their biggest competitive edge in the globalised economy. It has been very successful for them: in information technology services, in finance, in consulting, in international development, and so on. For three decades, English-language labour markets have been very kind to educated middle-class Indians.
This success has fostered one assumption: that they will take English with them wherever they go, including Taiwan.
It is not; not within a Taiwanese enterprise. The working language of a Taiwanese manufacturer, a semiconductor supplier, a precision engineering firm and a small and medium enterprise in the Hsinchu Science Park is Mandarin. Negotiations with the suppliers are in Mandarin. The de facto interconnectedness that allows you to be trusted with responsibility is created in Mandarin.
This is a barrier that may be faced by Indian students who enter Taiwan with proficiency in English. They are present. They are capable, but they are excluded from the discussions and relationships that would enable them to make progress. Language is not a rule to follow; it is a part of the work environment. Without it, any Indian graduate, no matter how brilliant, is a cog in a machine built for someone who can operate it in Mandarin.
The Social Proof Deficit
The lack of an active and audible alumni network compounds all of this. If an Indian student thinks of studying in the United States, they are filled with social proof. All the families in their sphere of acquaintance have someone who has gone. Some seniors return and make careers and can speak in specific, credible terms of what the journey looks like. The path is filled with actual stories of people.
The community is still too small to be socially visible, especially in Taiwan. Many Indian students have passed through Taiwan’s scholarship program, gained serious Mandarin skills and established long-term careers in the Taiwanese industries. However, the number of them is still not sufficient to establish a sense of social proof among students in India. If these stories are not told in Hindi, Tamil, and Telugu at the kitchen table in Pune, Hyderabad, and Jaipur, the Taiwan-Mandarin path will be a dream for the majority of Indian families.
A Closing Thought
Taiwan has contributed its part. The scholarships exist. The fellowships are awarded and funded. The doors are not just open; they are propped open, and the financial backing and institutional support, by any international measure, are quite remarkable. Taken together, the MOE Taiwan Scholarship, the ICDF programme and the MOFA Fellowship are an extraordinary opportunity, a fully funded route into one of the world’s most dynamic technological economies, for those who are prepared to make the effort.
The question is whether India’s students will find the patience to walk through. The honest answer really is no, not because the opportunity lacks merit, but because no one has prepared them to go through a slow, patient, community-less journey to Mandarin proficiency. The challenge to close that gap is not mainly a problem of the design of scholarships. It’s a cultural issue, a perception issue, and a social proof issue. But a single programme will not address it, no matter how well-resourced.
It will require something more difficult and more gradual to develop: a group of people who walked this road and returned with something to show for. If that community is there, say a few hundred, and visibly, then the calculus will change. In the meantime, Taiwan’s open door will stay open, but for most Indian students, the door they never got around to walking through.
Neeraj Mehra is currently working as an Assistant to the Director of the Education Division at the Taipei Economic and Cultural Centre in New Delhi. The author’s other articles on Taiwan-India Education Cooperation on Taiwan Insight can be found here: Taiwan-India University Cooperation: Emerging Corridors of Academic Exchange and Technological Diplomacy and Asymmetric Scholarship Paradox in India–Taiwan Relations.
This article was published as part of the special issue on ‘More Than Chips: Education, Innovation and Strategic Ties between India and Taiwan’.