Refuting reports that the state government has silently begun work on implementing a three-language policy, the Tamil Nadu School Education Department on Sunday asserted that the “two-language” policy of Tamil and English will continue and that there was no change in this regard.
In a statement, School Education Commissioner K Nanthakumar said the state government has clarified on several occasions that only a two-language policy will be followed. “Tamil and English, the link language to the world, are the only two languages that are (being taught),” he said.
According to a law enacted in 2006, the bureaucrat said, learning Tamil is compulsory till 10th standard. “For whom Tamil is not the mother tongue, we have options for them to learn Telugu, Kannada, Malayalam, and Urdu apart from Tamil,” he said.
Nanthakumar asked people not to believe “rumours” about a change in the state’s education policy. He was responding to a news report that the Tamil Nadu government was planning to shift to a three-language policy.
Tamil Nadu feels implementing a three-language policy as suggested by the National Education Policy (NEP) will allow the backdoor entry of Hindi into the state in the form of a third language. The DMK and AIADMK, which have ruled the state alternatively since 1967, are vehemently opposed to Hindi and have reiterated several times that the state will continue to follow the two-language policy.
The two language policy – Tamil and English – was announced by the then Chief Minister C N Annadurai in 1967 and successive governments have followed the policy without making any changes. DMK, the ruling party, vehemently opposed Union Home Minister Amit Shah’s suggestion of replacing Hindi with English as the link language of the country, opining it was not good for the unity of the country.
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