According to a Friday announcement from the Center, all significant schools and higher education institutions must provide instructional materials in Indian languages within the next three years.

In the next three years, all schools, higher education regulators such as UGC, AICTE, NCERT, NIOS, and IGNOU, as well as the leaders of key educational institutions including IITs, central universities, and NITs, would be required by government directive to provide study materials for all courses in Indian languages.

Textbooks for higher education and schools will be published in all of the regional languages specified in the Eighth Schedule of the Constitution, under the directives of the Center. The choice is consistent with the main proposal of National Education Policy 2020, which calls for all educational institutions to offer opportunities for studying in vernacular languages. Studying in one’s own tongue can give pupils “natural space to think innovatively without any language barrier,” according to the NEP 2020.

“The NEP-2020 strongly conveys the idea that multilingual nature of Bharat is its huge asset and strength which needs to be utilized efficiently for the socio-cultural, economic and educational development of the nation. Content creation in local languages will boost this multilingual asset and pave way for its better contribution to ‘Viksit Bharat’ to make our country as developed nation by 2047,” a statement from the education ministry said.

The government has been translating and uploading course materials on the eKumbh portal to promote the study of regional languages.

The official statement went on to say that additional undergraduate and graduate books, as well as books in the fields of law, medicine, engineering, and skill-related course material, had been uploaded. More than thirty regional languages are available on the DIKSHA portal’s educational materials for pupils.