Multilingual Education and India

It is always good when more reading and teaching materials are prepared in local languages.  The Education Department in Chhattisgarh is making progress on that, and that's worth noting.    The Multilingual Education (MLE) initiative in Bastar district of Chhattisgarh has expanded across 6,937 primary schools, reaching over 260,000 children and supported by 7,650 specially trained teachers. The program incorporates nine distinct local languages and regional variants—including Halbi, Bhatri, Dhurvi, Chhattisgarhi, Dorli, Madia, and three variants of Gondi (Kanker, Bastar, and Dantewada)—enabling classrooms to directly reflect the linguistic map of the region. The choice was made to have the textbooks and primers produced in diglot: Hindi on the left side and a local Tribal Language on the right. The materials are printed using the Devanagari script, enabling non-native teachers to easily read and speak the local text.  Aligned directly with the National Educatio...

© Abhishek Scariya Visiting local NGOs sometimes reveals hidden gems. When I was at the Asha Kiran Society in Southern Odia last week, they talked about a study they did six years ago to compare children in their MLE classes with children who had only regular school inputs.  While studies of these may not be at the quality of a scientific  paper, they do help us by providing a peek into the positive impact Multilingual Education has. Here are some learnings from their  internal report.  The COVID-19 pandemic caused disruptions to global education, forcing primary school students to endure six to eight months without proper classes or structured educational inputs.  This provided Asha Kiran with an opportunity to do a unique study - to check for ‘retained learning’ - after 6 months of no formal educational inputs! In November 2022 the Asha Kiran Society in southern Odia conducted a small, quasi-experimental study to see whether the children who had gone through ...