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A language consultation committee appointed by the Maharashtra government on Sunday opposed a decision to make Hindi a compulsory third language for students in Classes 1 to 5 in Marathi and English medium schools, The Hindu reported.
Laxmikant Deshmukh, chairperson of the committee, urged Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis to scrap the order.
On April 16, the state government announced a plan to implement the National Education Policy 2020 from the academic year 2025-’26.
The plan makes it compulsory for students in Classes 1 to 5 in Marathi and English medium schools to learn Hindi as a third language. The policy’s three-language formula will replace the prevailing two-language structure in these schools.
The phased implementation of the plan will begin with Class 1 in 2025-’26 and cover all grades by 2028-’29.
In a letter to Fadnavis on Sunday, Deshmukh said that primary school students should be taught in their mother tongue and that the three-language policy should be implemented only at the higher secondary level.
“The forced decision on Hindi language is unnecessary,” The Hindu quoted from the letter.
Deshmukh also noted that the quality of Marathi and English language instruction was poor as most schools had only one or two teachers. “Introducing a third language will increase the burden of the teachers and in the process the possibility of learning one language properly will decrease,” the letter said.
The committee also said that many language scholars and linguists believed few states had suffered as much “linguistic and cultural damage” from Hindi as Maharashtra.
“If the people of North India do not learn Marathi as a third language, despite the linguistic similarity and are not ready to speak Marathi even in Maharashtra as a migrant, then it is an insult to the Marathi language and its speakers to make Hindi mandatory by the government,” The Hindu quoted the committee as saying.
“If we don’t want Maharashtra to suffer more in the linguistic and cultural field, the government should reconsider and cancel the decision to make Hindi language compulsory,” it added.
The 2020 National Education Policy proposes major changes to the curricular structure for school education. It claims to promote flexibility in choosing academic streams and emphasises on using the mother tongue as a key medium of instruction in primary schools, among other measures.
The policy has been criticised for encouraging the privatisation of public institutions and creating several “exit” options for students, which opponents say could encourage dropouts.
Tamil Nadu has repeatedly opposed the three-language formula in the National Education Policy. The state government said it would not change its decades-old two-language policy of teaching students Tamil and English.
The three-language formula refers to teaching students English, Hindi and the native language of a state. It was introduced in the first National Education Policy in 1968 and was retained in the new policy introduced in 2020.
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