Mother Tongue Education: A Continuing Conversation

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Few questions in Indian public life have been argued about for as long, or with as little resolution, as the language in which a child should learn to read. The argument is not really about linguistics. It is about who gets access to government jobs, to higher education and to the kind of English speaking world that opens doors abroad. Every serious educational commission since independence has recommended that young children be taught in a language they already speak at home. Every decade since independence has also seen parents, including very poor parents, move their children out of such schools and into English medium classrooms as soon as they can afford the fees. Understanding why both things are true at once is the whole of the problem.

What the law and the policies actually say

The Constitution addresses the question directly. Article 350A, inserted by the Seventh Amendment in 1956, directs every state and local authority to endeavour to provide adequate facilities for instruction in the mother tongue at the primary stage to children of linguistic minority groups, and empowers the President to issue directions to that end. Articles 29 and 30 protect the right of linguistic minorities to conserve their language and to establish and administer educational institutions. The Eighth Schedule lists the languages the Union is obliged to develop, a list that began with fourteen and now stands at twenty two after Bodo, Dogri, Maithili and Santali were added in 2003.

Policy has been consistent in direction. The Education Commission chaired by D. S. Kothari, which reported in 1966, endorsed teaching in the regional language and gave shape to the three language formula that the National Policy on Education adopted in 1968: broadly, the regional language, Hindi, and English, with the expectation that Hindi speaking states would teach a modern Indian language from the south. The National Curriculum Framework of 2005 restated the case for the home language as the medium of early instruction. The National Education Policy approved in 2020 goes furthest, recommending that wherever possible the medium of instruction until at least Grade 5, and preferably to Grade 8 and beyond, be the home language, mother tongue, local language or regional language. The NIPUN Bharat mission launched in 2021 to secure foundational literacy and numeracy rests on the same assumption.

The three language formula has never been applied uniformly. Tamil Nadu has followed a two language policy of Tamil and English since a state assembly resolution in 1968, a position rooted in the anti Hindi agitations of the late 1930s and of 1965. Several Hindi speaking states, meanwhile, quietly substituted Sanskrit for a southern language, which removed the reciprocity that made the formula defensible in the first place.

Why the evidence favours the home language

The pedagogical case is not sentimental. Reading is the act of mapping written symbols onto sounds and meanings a child already holds. A six year old who speaks Marathi arrives at school with a vocabulary of thousands of words, a working grammar and a sense of how stories go. Teaching her to read in Marathi asks her to learn one new thing, the script. Teaching her to read in a language she does not speak asks her to learn the script, the vocabulary, the grammar and the content simultaneously, usually from a teacher whose own English is insecure. UNESCO first set out the argument in a monograph on the use of vernacular languages in education published in 1953, and the international research literature since then, including work on the transfer of literacy skills between languages, has broadly supported it. Skills learned in a first language do not have to be relearned; they transfer.

Indian survey evidence is consistent with this. The Annual Status of Education Report, a large household survey conducted across rural districts, has for years found that a substantial share of children in the upper primary grades cannot fluently read a text written at Grade 2 level, and the shortfall is worst where instruction is in an unfamiliar language and teacher preparation is weakest. Programmes of multilingual education in tribal districts, notably in Odisha and Andhra Pradesh, which begin instruction in languages such as Santali, Kui and Saora before bridging to the state language, have generally reported better early attendance and comprehension than the state language only classroom they replaced.

The English question, and what mother tongue even means

Against this stands a preference that policy has never been able to argue away. English is the language of the higher judiciary, of most professional higher education, of the corporate sector and of emigration. Parents observe, correctly, that the children of the well off learn in English, and they draw the obvious conclusion. Low fee private schools advertising English medium instruction have multiplied across small towns for three decades, often delivering English in name while teaching in the local language in practice. In 2019 the Andhra Pradesh government ordered the conversion of government primary schools to English medium; the state High Court struck the order down in 2020 on the ground that it removed parental choice and conflicted with policy, and the matter went on to the Supreme Court. The episode is a fair summary of the whole dispute: a government acting on parental demand, a court invoking pedagogy, and no stable settlement.

There is also a definitional problem that is often glossed over. The 2011 Census recorded well over a thousand mother tongues returned by respondents, grouped into a much smaller number of languages, of which 121 had significant speaker populations. A child in rural Bihar may speak Magahi or Angika at home and be taught in standard Hindi, which is officially her mother tongue and practically is not. A child of migrants in Bengaluru may speak Odia at home, Kannada in the street and be taught in English. When a policy says mother tongue, it frequently means the dominant regional language, which for millions of children is itself a second language. Genuine home language instruction would require textbooks, teacher training and examination systems in far more languages than any state currently maintains.

The honest position is that the research supports early instruction in a familiar language, that the demand for English is rational rather than misguided, and that the two are only reconcilable if English is taught well as a subject from the early years while the medium remains familiar. That is what the 2020 policy attempts. Whether states can staff and fund it, in a country where teacher vacancies and multi grade classrooms remain ordinary, is a separate question that no document can settle.

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