Shillong MP and Congress politician Vincent Pala has taken a strong line against the Centre’s push to make Hindi compulsory in schools in the eight North East states up to Class 10.
Pala told Highland Post yesterday that he will write to Prime Minister Narendra Modi on the matter.
“We don’t even have ample Hindi teachers and our people can’t even pronounce the Hindi language properly. Something like this cannot be forced and it depends on the people to decide and choose so I oppose this,” he said.
On Thursday, Union Home Minister Amit Shah said that Hindi will now be made compulsory in all eight states in the region up to Class 10 and that more attention must be paid to Hindi exams.
“Twenty-two thousand Hindi teachers have been recruited in the eight states of the North East,” Shah said. “Nine tribal communities of the North East have converted their dialects’ scripts to Devanagari.”
At the 37th meeting of the Parliamentary Official Language Committee in New Delhi, Shah said that “now the time has come to make the official language an important part of the unity of the country.”
English and Hindi are the two official languages of India at the central level and the Eighth Schedule of the Constitution lists another 21 languages that are also official in certain respects. However, Hindi has no formal status as national language, though it is commonly considered to be so.
The home minister described Hindi as “the language of India” and said that it should be used by citizens from different states to communicate with each other
