NEW DELHI: On International Mother Language Day on February 21, the High Powered Committee for the Promotion of Indian Languages, set up by the Union education ministry last year, will launch a nationwide social media campaign to promote native languages as envisaged in the National Education Policy (NEP) 2020.
The Central Institute of Classical Tamil, Chennai, and Central Institute of Indian Languages, Mysore, are also part of this social media campaign, said Chamu Krishna Shastry, who chairs the committee, whose mandate is to explore and recommend pathways for the holistic and multidisciplinary growth of Indian languages.
Advocating the use of Mother Tongue Day instead of International Mother Language Day as declared by UNESCO, Shastry, a Padma Shri awardee, said, “My focus is ‘matra bhasha diwas’ (Mother Tongue Day). If you use international, then you lose the Indian context.”
“India is completely different from other countries. Most of the countries are monolingual; our society is multilingual,” he told TNIE.
To celebrate the day, the committee has developed posters and selected 19 quotes of prominent persons like Aurobindo, Rabindranath Tagore, Mahatma Gandhi, APJ Abdul Kalam, and excerpts from NEP regarding mother tongue.
These quotes will be translated into 22 scheduled languages, including Tamil, Telugu, Urdu, Sindhi, Sanskrit, said Shastry, an educationist and founding member of NGO Samskrita Bharati.
“The purpose of the social media campaign is to highlight the importance of mother tongue. If a child is taught in English and not their mother tongue, he will lose command over his mother tongue. For the development of any individual mother tongue is the most important. Also, through this campaign, we want to highlight NEP 2020.”
The NEP 2020 advocates promotion of Indian languages and recommends that efforts should be taken to preserve and promote all Indian languages.
“The idea behind the campaign is also to create a conducive environment for the promotion of Indian languages and bring awareness,” Shastry said.
He said all educational institutions in India would also promote Indian languages, including classical, minority, tribal, and endangered languages.