NEW DELHI – The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) urges the Indian government to implement dedicated schemes, separate budgets, and specific teacher recruitment strategies for mother tongue-based multilingual education (MTB-MLE). These key recommendations come from UNESCO’s State of the Education Report for India 2025, titled “Bhasha Matters,” released recently.
Dedicated Funding and National Mission
The report emphasizes the need for dedicated budget lines within both central and state government schemes. These funds would specifically finance MTB-MLE initiatives. UNESCO also calls for a “national mission” to harmonize school and cluster-level language mapping across the country. This mission would bring together diverse ministries working on education, tribal affairs, culture, and technology for effective implementation.
Key Challenges Identified
India faces significant challenges in implementing multilingual education. These obstacles directly impact student learning and participation:
- Limited availability of textbooks and teaching-learning materials in children’s own languages.
- Persistence of monolingual teaching practices in classrooms with multiple languages.
- Many teachers feel unprepared for multilingual lesson design or language mapping.
- Under-representation of various tribal and minority languages on digital platforms.
- Inconsistent digital accessibility features and connectivity gaps, especially in remote regions.
The report highlights that young learners in many tribal and minority language regions often begin school in languages they do not speak at home. This practice affects early participation and comprehension, particularly for girls in remote settings and children with communication or learning disabilities.
Policy Alignment and Linguistic Diversity
The National Education Policy (NEP) stresses education in the mother tongue up to Class 5. India is a linguistically diverse nation, with 121 constitutionally recognized languages and 1,369 mother tongues, according to Census 2011. To support multilingual education, the National Council for Educational Research and Training (NCERT) has released primers for 121 languages.
Equitable and Inclusive Financing
UNESCO recommends a specific government scheme to fund multilingual teacher recruitment, training, material development, digital inclusion, and research. It also suggests creating financing mechanisms with targeted allocations for girls, children with disabilities, and non-dominant language communities.
For the central government, the report stresses leveraging digital public infrastructure. State governments should adopt clear language-in-education policies. These policies must be based on school and cluster-level language mapping. They should specify how languages will be used as instructional mediums, subjects, and co-curricular resources across all educational stages. This includes establishing pathways for languages such as Santhali, Gondi, Kui, Saora, Ho, Mizo, and Tado.
Strengthening Teacher Recruitment and Training
States should adopt recruitment rules prioritizing teachers proficient in learners’ home and regional languages, especially in tribal and border areas. The National Professional Standards for Teachers and state norms must explicitly include multilingual pedagogy and language-responsive assessment as core professional competencies.
Bodies like the National Council for Educational Research and Training (NCERT) and universities should reform pre-service and in-service teacher education to embed multilingual pedagogy at all stages. Teacher-education curricula should be stage-differentiated, focusing on mother tongue-led early literacy, bilingual scaffolds in middle schools, and multi-script academic literacy strategies in secondary education. Developing and distributing high-quality multilingual learning materials is also essential, along with standardizing multilingual pedagogy across all stages.
Community Participation
Institutionalizing community participation can significantly enhance language learning. Engaging storytellers, elders, artisans, artists, cultural practitioners, and community workers is crucial. Their involvement in curriculum development, classroom activities, and teacher education modules will enrich MTB-MLE initiatives and support effective implementation.