Chhattisgarh Scales Mother-Tongue Learning Across 9 Bastar Languages
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 Education Policy (NEP) 2020, the pedagogical strategy uses the home language as a foundational bridge, allowing children to build core literacy skills before slowly transitioning into Hindi as a second language. As Chief Minister Vishnu Deo Sai noted, starting in the child's native tongue builds early academic confidence while actively protecting indigenous heritage. Moving forward, the ultimate success of this framework will depend on expanding the diglot model beyond Class II and continually evaluating whether the learning materials truly reflect the lived cultural realities of the children using them.
A key question to ask would be whether the stories in the books were produced in the tribal language with local illustrations and then back translated to Hindi, or that these were stories developed in Hindi with mainstream culture content and then being translated to the tribal language. The first approach would be much better, as that would not only take the 𝑙𝑎𝑛𝑔𝑢𝑎𝑔𝑒 but also the 𝑐𝑢𝑙𝑡𝑢𝑟𝑒 of the children seriously and help them connect with the story's content. It would also help celebrate the tremendous richness of local stories. But even if the second approach was taken and mainstream content was translated into tribal languages, it would still be progress, as at least the children would be able to understand the words.
For those not yet convinced that textbooks in the local language are needed, this report includes an important finding from the language survey conducted by the Language and Learning Foundation in collaboration with SCERT and Samagra Shiksha Chhattisgarh. It mapped the home languages of more than 4.12 lakh Class I students across 29,755 primary schools and found that around 𝟳𝟱% 𝗼𝗳 𝘀𝘁𝘂𝗱𝗲𝗻𝘁𝘀 𝗳𝗮𝗰𝗲𝗱 𝘀𝗲𝘃𝗲𝗿𝗲 𝗱𝗶𝗳𝗳𝗶𝗰𝘂𝗹𝘁𝗶𝗲𝘀 understanding their school syllabus simply due to the language gap.
It would be good to see more State Councils of Educational Research & Training picking up this challenge of producing more books in local languages!
Regards,
Karsten, in collaboration with Upasana
Resources:
Mother-tongue-based learning gains momentum in Chhattisgarh's tribal schools - The Statesman.
https://languageandlearningfoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/LM-Report-Chhattisgarh
Photo source- Bastar District Map. Source: India Map