It was in Midadapalli, a small village set deep in the forested tracts of central India, that I met Swapnil Keye Wadde.
A Madia Gond tribal, he was in a government school in the state of Maharashtra, struggling to read the first lesson from his frayed Marathi language textbook.
Swapnil’s schooling had done little to improve his reading skills. He laboured to even recognise individual letters.
Nearly a decade has passed since that encounter but this anecdote still remains pertinent. Swapnil is an example of millions of Indian children who lag behind in classrooms and risk turning out to be semi-literate despite years of “education”.
About a quarter of Indian teens aged 14 to 18 cannot fluently read text meant for six- to seven-year-olds fluently in their regional languages, and at least 42.7 per cent cannot read sentences in English, according to the latest Annual Status of Education Report from January 2024. This learning deficit inflicts a high economic cost by making India’s youth unemployable. One in two Indian graduates are unemployable – a sobering figure from the Economic Survey tabled to Parliament in July.
Sure, poor quality of teaching and infrequent attendance at schools – when many children skip classes and chip in to help their families earn money – are responsible for this unfavourable outcome.
But another key reason is that children such as Swapnil are taught in languages other than those they are most comfortable in and speak at home, limiting meaningful interaction in classrooms and enforcing a culture of rote learning.
He and his community members speak Madia Gondi, and they struggle to understand Maharashtra’s official and dominant language, Marathi. The two languages are members of two different linguistic families and are mutually unintelligible. Yet, the state government remains adamant in teaching Madia children in an unfamiliar language.
Being taught in Marathi has made learning for these tribal children an even more challenging process, giving them a wobbly academic foundation. A similar fate befalls millions more across India who study at young ages in official and dominant languages, rather than the ones they are most fluent and expressive in.
India’s linguistic divide
The reality today is that Indian states, which were laid out along linguistic lines, have taught or used only a limited number of languages at their schools.
One of the most linguistically diverse countries, India recognises just 22 official languages, including Marathi and Hindi, perpetuating the social and political dominance of these languages. By its own admission, the country has 99 “non-scheduled” languages, unlike the 22 listed in the Eighth Schedule of the Indian Constitution and those the state is “obligated” to develop.
In contrast, the People’s Linguistic Survey of India, a civil society effort, documented 780 Indian languages in 2010. This means millions have slipped through India’s linguistic fault lines, their languages and cultures relegated to the margins and even denigrated by speakers of dominant languages. Some of these languages – such as Gondi and Bhili – have millions of speakers but still get disregarded.
“This dichotomy between dominant and dominated languages and cultures has created a big rift between students and the teachers in the classroom, as well as in the society,” said Dr Mahendra Kumar Mishra, former state coordinator for Odisha’s multilingual education (MLE) programme.
Victims of this rift come from indigenous tribal communities and marginalised caste groups. Already at the bottom of India’s social hierarchy, these children are further marginalised in government classrooms, where they are taught by teachers from dominant communities who lack appreciation of their students’ languages and cultures.
Being educated in an alien language in such intimidating environments makes schools more unfriendly, stunting early learning and depriving children of the opportunity to use their education to escape longstanding economic inequalities.
Benefits of multilingual education
Global research suggests that education in the mother tongue improves learning outcomes. The eastern Indian state of Odisha, home to an estimated 22 tribal languages, has witnessed this encouraging change. The state began offering education to students from 10 tribal groups in their languages in some primary schools in 2007.
A 2011 government assessment of this MLE programme found that children in MLE schools received significantly higher scores in mathematics and language than their counterparts in non-MLE schools. An increase in enrolment was also seen in MLE schools, where students reported better self-confidence and increased participation in learning.
There is now a growing appreciation of the benefits of education in the mother tongue. The Indian government’s National Education Policy, introduced in 2020, states that wherever possible, a child’s mother tongue will be the medium of instruction until at least Grade 5 (when children are around nine), but preferably till Grade 8 and beyond.
Some Indian states, including tribal-dominated Chhattisgarh and Jharkhand, have announced efforts to teach students in their mother tongues, with the former introducing bilingual language textbooks for Grades 1 and 2 in Hindi and 16 indigenous languages in 2021.
States in India can design their own educational curriculum. Yet, there are only about 30 languages used as a medium of instruction in the country’s schools, with the vast majority of students studying in major languages such as Hindi, Bengali, Tamil, Gujarati and Telugu.
Holding back children’s progress?
The push for MLE has, unfortunately, raised concerns about how “mother tongue fanatics” risk keeping Indians poor and backward by limiting exposure to English and other major languages that promise a better economic future.
What these critics miss though is that no one opposes the teaching of English or Hindi. MLE activists are instead advocating a delay in the introduction of a second language until children have emerged as confident learners in their mother tongue, giving them the necessary scaffolding to better learn a second language.
“If you have a strong foundation of another language, additional languages, the languages of economic heft, can be learnt well even if they are not taught from the very beginning,” said Dr Dhir Jhingran, the founder of Language and Learning Foundation, a non-profit that supports the roll-out of MLE in a number of states.
A 2006 assessment in Ethiopia showed that the use of English as a medium of instruction in primary schools did not necessarily result in better English learning. In fact, regions with stronger mother tongue schooling (such as in Oromo and Tigrinya) reported higher student achievement levels at Grade 8 in all subjects, including English. Primary school enrolment in Ethiopia begins at the age of seven and comprises eight grades.
While children are naturally able to absorb languages, the teaching of languages in Indian classrooms is usually formal and textbook-centred, which limits opportunities for interactive learning.
“So in the early years, it is very important that the language the child understands and speaks is used... One can build upon that by adding additional languages,” noted Dr Jhingran.
He suggests a “good compromise” is to introduce English and other non-mother tongue languages as subjects at age seven when children are usually in Grade 3, while informal exposure to these languages in the classroom through storytelling and small conversations can happen even earlier.
Challenges in rolling out multilingual programmes
Despite wide acknowledgement of the benefits of MLE, rolling out such programmes has not been easy. Finding the necessary funds is perhaps the least of challenges. What is more difficult is to change ingrained biases that regard India’s non-official languages – each with its rich oral as well as written traditions – as “inferior” and inappropriate for classroom use.
Another hurdle: Many non-official languages straddle multiple state borders and are influenced by several dominant languages. It is therefore difficult to get speakers of such languages to agree on one standardised form to be introduced in schools.
The other bottleneck is finding teachers who can teach in these languages. States recruit teachers through competitive exams with no quotas for specific languages, leaving candidates from marginalised linguistic backgrounds at a considerable disadvantage. Often, this results in Hindi-speaking teachers posted to tribal areas where primary school pupils only speak languages such as Halbi or Gondi and can barely stitch together a sentence in Hindi.
Dr Jhingran suggests programmes that train locals as assistant teachers on an ad-hoc basis to support multilingual teaching in government schools can help.
Making classrooms more representative
Importantly, local recruitment creates space for indigenous cultures and world views in the classrooms, leading to better engagement from students.
“If you are able to do that, then that is multilingual education. Otherwise, it is just a multilingual class,” said Ms Samiksha Godse, an educator who has worked to deepen access to education for Madia Gonds in their language by helping to set up a school that trains and employs Madia Gond teachers, besides using their language along with English in classrooms.
An education system with no place for the cultures or languages of its students can inflict deep consequences on children, besides further entrenching dominant cultures and threatening India’s rich diversity..
Take the example of Mr Laxmidhar Singh, a 36-year-old Ho tribal rights activist in Odisha. Mr Singh is a product of Odia-medium government schools, where he was asked to write essays on subjects he was unfamiliar with, including Durga Puja, a Hindu festival that the nature-worshipping Hos know little about, and a visit to a circus that many have never seen.
This forced students to memorise what their teachers or reference books told them, promoting rote learning.
“The creativity that a child is supposed to develop early on was set back right at the start,” said Mr Singh, adding that he “could have done better” at school had Ho language and culture been included in his curriculum.
Children, for instance, were not asked to write essays on Mage Parab, the main Ho festival dedicated to Singbonga, their supreme deity – something they would have expressed eloquently.
He fought his way through nonetheless, even graduating from two of the top national English-medium universities. But many others like him do not make it that far, perpetuating historical injustices.
More than 7½ decades after independence, it is a shame that millions in India should fail to realise their full potential because they are not taught in their mother tongue.
It is a global problem too. Around 40 per cent of the world’s population do not have access to an education in a language they speak or understand.
Expanding India’s MLE will bring many benefits, including protecting India’s diversity at a time when more than half of India’s 780 languages are projected to go extinct in the next 50 years.
It will also foster wider social equity and justice, giving children from India’s marginalised communities a better shot at claiming their rightful share in the country’s development – like Sandeep Kumar Mandavi and Kamala Muchaki, two eight-year-old tribal students in central India.
I interacted with them on a video call while they sat on a mat on the floor of their primary school classroom in Chhattisgarh’s Bastar district during their Hindi class. They stumbled often while reading their Grade 3 Hindi poem but were eloquent when spoken to in Gondi and Halbi.
Sandeep wants to become a police official and Kamala dreams of becoming a school teacher. Teaching them in their languages will catapult them – and millions of other children – closer to their goals.
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