National Education Policy Enrolment in Mother Tongue Medium Rises 28 Per Cent

NEP Mother Tongue Programme Records Significant Gains

The Ministry of Education has released its second annual progress review of the National Education Policy 2020, revealing that enrolment in mother tongue medium primary education has risen by 28 per cent across the 14 states that have so far operationalised the NEP's tri-lingual instruction framework. The data, compiled from the Unified District Information System for Education Plus portal, reflects outcomes across approximately 11 million primary school students.

The gains are most pronounced in tribal and forest-belt districts. In Jharkhand, where Santhali and Ho language medium instruction was piloted across 1,200 government schools, the annual dropout rate in Classes 1 through 3 has declined from 14.2 per cent to 6.8 per cent over two years. Officials attribute the improvement to children's ability to engage with curriculum content in the language of their home environment, particularly in numeracy and early literacy.

Teacher Training Remains the Constraint

Despite the positive enrolment and retention trends, the review identifies teacher training as the persistent bottleneck. The NEP's tri-lingual framework requires a sufficient pool of teachers who can deliver instruction in the local language while concurrently building students' competency in regional and national languages. The review finds that the shortfall of trained teachers in tribal languages is most acute in the northeastern states, where 23 scheduled languages are spoken across a combined school-going population of roughly 1.4 million children.

The State Institutes of Education in Odisha and Madhya Pradesh have developed short-duration bridge certification programmes for existing teachers with tribal language fluency, and these programmes have shown promising results in reducing the hiring backlog. The Ministry is now considering mandating the model nationally through the revised National Curriculum Framework for Teacher Education.

Private Schools Lag Behind

An important caveat in the data is that the gains are concentrated in the government school system. Private unaided schools, which account for approximately 40 per cent of total enrolments nationally, have been far slower to adopt the mother tongue medium framework, citing curriculum continuity concerns and parental demand for English-medium instruction from an early stage. The Ministry has indicated it will introduce regulatory guidance for private schools in the next academic calendar.

Educationists have broadly welcomed the early data while cautioning that genuine learning outcome improvements require longitudinal measurement beyond enrolment and retention metrics. A National Achievement Survey focused specifically on NEP cohorts is scheduled for the coming year and will provide a more granular picture of whether the mother tongue medium approach is translating into improved foundational literacy and numeracy outcomes across India's diverse language ecology.