Union Home Minister Amit Shah said on Wednesday that only 6% of the children received education in English and a large majority who did not speak fluent English were deprived of a platform at the national and State levels.
Mr. Shah appealed to guardians to speak to children in their mother tongue to enable them to learn Hindi without much effort.
He said it was time that inferiority complex around Indian languages, instilled by the British, was overthrown from people’s conscience with the help of regional languages and Hindi.
Mr. Shah said Hindi was not a competitor but a “friend” of all the other regional languages in the country and they were mutually dependent on each other for their growth.
False campaign
He said there was a concerted “disinformation” campaign to pit Hindi against other languages such as Marathi and Tamil, and underlined the need to strengthen local languages with Hindi.
‘Make Hindi flexible’
Addressing the All-India Official Language Conference in Surat on Hindi Divas, Mr. Shah said that accepting the coexistence of languages was necessary, and stressed the need to make Hindi flexible by taking words from other languages to expand its dictionary.
Mr. Shah observed that unless the Hindi language became flexible, it could not grow.
“I want to make one thing very clear. Some people are spreading disinformation that Hindi and Gujarati, Hindi and Tamil, Hindi and Marathi are competitors. Hindi cannot be a competitor to any other language in the country. You must understand that Hindi is the friend of all the languages of the country,” Mr. Amit Shah said.
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