The NDA government’s National Education Policy that seeks to promote learning through the mother tongue has ignored the children of linguistic minorities who speak a language different from that of their state, a parliamentary panel has said.

The standing committee on education, headed by Congress MP Digvijaya Singh, has underlined what it considers an inherent flaw in the NEP that has forced children from minority linguistic groups to receive education in a language other than their mother tongue.

The National Education Policy (NEP) 2020 recommends that the medium of instruction until at least Grade 5, and preferably till Grade 8 and beyond, be the home language/ mother tongue/ local language/ regional language.

“It is well understood that young children learn and grasp nontrivial concepts more quickly in their home language/ mother tongue. Home language is usually the same language as the mother tongue or that which is spoken by local communities,” the NEP says.

The parliamentary committee has said the NEP “doesn’t adequately grapple with the circumstance of linguistic minorities” because it by and large equates the home language and the mother tongue with the language “spoken by local communities”.

However, the mother tongue of linguistic minorities is different from the language spoken in their state or region, the panel report says.

The government’s education scheme, therefore, “has no special focus or programmes for students belonging to linguistic minorities”, the report says.

“This has a cascading impact on state-level policies to support linguistic minorities. For instance, Maharashtra — which has 4.6 lakh Gondi speakers as of 2011 — does not have a single Gondi-medium school.”

Panchanan Mohanty, a retired professor of linguistics who taught at the Central University of Hyderabad, said: “Since no linguist was involved in its framing, the NEP 2020 does not distinguish between the mother tongue, home language, local language and regional language.”

“Today, even the home language and the mother tongue are not the same language in many families in the metro cities, because the mother speaks one language and the father another, and the child picks up both languages simultaneously.”

He said the local and regional languages are different from the mother tongue in many areas, particularly tribal areas.

A child in Odisha whose mother tongue is Sora or Paraja may find the medium of instruction in the local school to be Odia. As a result, tribal children are denied education in their mother tongue because of the ambiguous recommendation in the NEP 2020 document, Mohanty said.