The Centre has announced a major initiative to promote multilingualism in education and provide students with the opportunity to study in their mother tongue. According to the Union Education Ministry, all school and higher education regulators and institutions will have to make study material available in regional languages for all courses in the next three years.
Why regional languages?
The decision is in line with the National Education Policy 2020, which envisions all educational institutions to provide learning opportunities in vernacular languages. The NEP 2020 states that studying in mother tongue can provide students “natural space to think innovatively without any language barrier”. The policy also aims to preserve and promote the linguistic diversity of India, which has 22 official languages and hundreds of other languages and dialects.
How will it be done?
The Centre has asked the University Grants Commission, the All India Council for Technical Education, the National Council of Educational Research and Training, the National Institute of Open Schooling, the Indira Gandhi National Open University and the heads of Indian Institutes of Technology, Central Universities, and National Institutes of Technology to take up the issue expeditiously. Study material for all courses under school and higher education will be made available digitally in Indian languages included in the 8th Schedule of the Constitution, which lists 22 languages apart from Hindi and English.
The government has already been working on this direction during the past two years, with translation of engineering, medical, law, undergraduate, postgraduate and skill books being done through the Anuvadini AI based app. These books are available on the e-Kumbh portal. For school students, learning material has been provided on DIKSHA portal in more than 30 regional languages.
What about entrance exams?
The Centre has also made provisions for conducting major entrance exams such as Joint Entrance Examination (JEE), National Eligibility cum Entrance Test (NEET) and Central Universities Entrance Test (CUET) in 13 different regional languages. This will enable students from diverse backgrounds to access higher education without any linguistic disadvantage.