Binay Bhushan Girls’ Middle School at Bangali Tola in Darbhanga. Picture by Mukesh Kumar Jha

Guardians with a will to educate their wards in the Bengali medium are hard pressed to practise it for the past three decades.

Till 1981, several students enrolled in Bengali minority schools in the state. But the numbers have just gone down after that. Most of the faculty members in the Bengali minority schools running in the state teach the students in Hindi.

Schools are accorded linguistic minority status under the Constitution. According to the constitutional provisions, students in such schools are supposed to be taught in their mother tongue, in this case Bengali. So, if a Bengali-medium school is duly recognised by the tenets of law in Bihar, a Hindi-speaking state, the school must have faculty members who can teach the students in the language. The government must provide them the textbooks, syllabi and exam papers for all subjects in Bengali.

Over the past 30 years, the medium of instruction at most of the Bengali minority schools has shifted to Hindi because of an acute shortage of teachers and textbooks.

Bihar traditionally has Bengali population in Seemanchal (border regions), comprising Purnea, Katihar, Kishanganj, Araria, Mithila (primarily Darbhanga and Madhubani) and Patna. The schools, however, are in want of teachers and facilities to educate the students in their preferred language because of government neglect.

In Darbhanga, most of the linguistically minority institutions have undergone a structural change. Around 99 per cent of the students are Hindi-speaking. Samapti Sengupta, the principal of Binay Bhushan Girls’ Middle School, said: “We have around 175 students, including a few students from the Bengali community. They prefer to study in Hindi. Around 30 years ago, we used to teach students in Bengali but they later faced problems when they reached high school. Neither did they have faculty members to teach them in the medium at secondary and higher secondary schools nor did they get their result on time.

“Gradually, the number of teachers came down and we fell short of the requisite books. Guardians had no other option but to change the medium of their wards’ education because of the lack of Bengali-medium institutions at the secondary-, higher-secondary- and college-levels.”

Darbhanga has three minority schools — Pitambari Bangla Middle School, Binay Bhushan Girls’ Middle School and Hekak Institute, popular as Bangla School — and the medium of instruction is Hindi at all of them.

Jayant Kumar Chaudhary, a resident of Bangali Tola, said: “Every Bengali family wants to educate their kids in their mother tongue but proper textbooks are unavailable at the school-level. Teachers at most of the Bengali schools have retired and there has been no fresh appointment a long time.”