Maharashtra language panel rejects govt. decision to make Hindi compulsory in schools 

The Maharashtra government-appointed Language Consultation Committee chairperson Laxmikant Deshmukh has opposed the State government’s decision to make Hindi compulsory. In a letter to Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis, the panel has urged the government to scrap the order.  

Maharashtra’s decision, part of the National Education Policy (NEP) 2020, to make Hindi a compulsory third language from Classes 1 to 5, was announced on April 17, 2025.  The decision mandates that Hindi be taught alongside Marathi and English, according to the NEP. 

The letter has highlighted several points such as, “The primary school students should be taught in mother tongue, and the three-language policy should be implemented from higher secondary level only. The forced decision on Hindi language is unnecessary. At present the quality of Marathi and English language in school education is poor as most of the schools have one or two teachers. Introducing a third language will increase the burden of the teachers and in the process the possibility of learning one language properly will decrease.” 

If Hindi speaking teachers will be selected based on their speaking skills, the employment of Marathi teachers will also be taken away from them, the letter said. “This will cause cognitive load on children’s brains. Since English language has been made compulsory in Maharashtra since 2001 and is required for parental approval and higher education, the State government has adopted a policy of “better English with better Marathi” as per the report of the Language Advisory Committee.” 

Many language scholars and linguists are of the opinion that hardly any State has suffered as much linguistic and cultural damage to Maharashtra due to Hindi. North Indians and south Indians do not learn each other’s language as a third language due to extreme heterogeneity of language and script. But in Maharashtra, Hindi language is learned and taught. If the people of north India do not learn Marathi as a third language, despite the linguistic similarity and are not ready to speak Marathi even in Maharashtra as a migrant, then it is an insult to the Marathi language and its speakers to make Hindi mandatory by the government, the panel said.  

If we don’t want Maharashtra to suffer more in the linguistic and cultural field, the government should reconsider and cancel the decision to make Hindi language compulsory, the committee said.