NEW DELHI: United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) on Tuesday called for a national mission in India to ensure consistent mother-tongue or home language- based instruction in the country. There needs to be multilingual bridging across all schooling systems, it urged.

Making public its 165-page report, `Bhasha Matters: The State of the Education Report for India 2025; Mother Tongue and Multilingual Education’ at its office in Delhi, it came out with ten recommendations to be incorporated in the country’s Education Policy.

Tim Curtis, Director, UNESCO Regional Office for South Asia, who released it said the UNESCO Regional Office for South Asia has established a tradition of publishing an annual flagship report as our contribution to the education discourse in India.  

Elaborating on this year’s report he said, “We turn to a theme central to equitable learning — Mother Tongue and Multilingual Education. Over the next hour, you will hear the compelling evidence-based for establishing Mother Tongue and Multilingual Education as the foundation for educational inclusion, linguistic diversity preservation and enhanced learning outcomes through stories and testimonies, and learn about the frameworks and global commitments that guide UNESCO’s work.  

“UNESCO has encouraged mother tongue instruction in primary education since 1953 highlighting its advantages from the very beginning of the Organisation’s founding. In 2003, UNESCO released `Education in a Multilingual World’, acknowledging the global reality of multilingual education and the challenges and opportunities it presents.”

The 2025 report provides a comprehensive framework for designing, implementing, and sustaining multilingual education systems. “It emphasises learner-centered language pathways, inclusive pedagogy, community participation, and context-responsive planning — all of which have informed the analysis and recommendations in this year’s report.” 

“As part of this research, our team travelled across India, including to Odisha, Telangana, and Andhra Pradesh, and visited schools, institutions and civil society organisations,” he said. This publication is the product of consultations with academicians, state governments, the national government, NGOs, teachers, community members, and — most importantly — students. 

Recommendations:

• Adopt and operationalise clear state-level language-in-education policies grounded in Mother-Tongue Based-Multilingual Education (MTB-MLE).

• Strengthen teacher recruitment, deployment and professional standards for multilingual competence.

• Reform pre-service and in-service teacher education to embed multilingual pedagogy at all stages.

• Institutionalise community participation and indigenous knowledge in school practice

• Develop and distribute high-quality multilingual learning materials and assessments across grades.

• Integrate a gender-responsive MTB-MLE framework across middle, secondary and alternative schooling.

• Leverage digital public infrastructure for inclusive, multilingual teacher support and learning resources.

• Invest in inclusive language technologies and bridge the digital divide

• Ensure sustainable, equitable and inclusive financing for MTB-MLE and language-responsive technologies and

• Establish a national mission for MTB-MLE and strengthen institutional co—ordination.

The story is reported by S Lalitha of The New Indian Express