Language, Identity, and the Classroom in Multilingual India
National education policy promises mother-tongue instruction, but teacher training and exam systems still reward a narrow band of languages.
In border districts, students code-switch before they code. Policy documents celebrate that reality; textbooks often ignore it. The gap shows up in dropout rates where regional languages dominate home life but English dominates employment ads.
States experimenting with early-grade bilingual modules report better retention, yet face a shortage of instructors comfortable in both pedagogical grammar and local dialect. Fixing that pipeline matters more than another curriculum rewrite.