Linguistic Diversity, Education, and Democracy in India: Prospects and Challenges
India’s National Education Policy 2020 (NEP 2020) promotes mother-tongue based multilingual education. Welcoming this recommendation, this essay looks at the policy in the context of India’s linguistic diversity, and the already existing provisions for multilingual education. We list some of the conceptual and implementation challenges that NEP 2020 faces. The essay also overviews a few promising initiatives that show the way forward for a just, equitable, and sustainable policy for a mother-tongue based multilingual education in a democratic polity like India.