Teaching Languages or Teaching Unity? Controversy Over India’s Three Language Formula

Many aspects of India’s diversity, while intellectually fascinating, continue to cause social and political tension. Languages are no exception to this rule. Recently, the chief minister of Tamil Nadu criticized the central government for cutting funds for his state’s schools. The central government’s rationale for doing so was that Tamil Nadu failed to follow one of the national guidelines on teaching languages: the three language formula. In Tamil Nadu, however, the policy is controversial.

At the risk of stating the obvious, there is no one language that all Indians speak. We may imagine, for instance, a Hindi-speaking peasant from Uttar Pradesh being dropped in the middle of the Tamil Nadu countryside, where everyone speaks Tamil, and not being able to communicate with the locals. On the other hand, Indians usually speak more than one Indian language, and so while comparing two persons from two very distant rural areas may not lead us to a common linguistic denominator between them, it is usually different in the cities. In cities there would often be another language via which two persons could communicate – or another person to interpret between them if not.

Moreover, while hundreds of languages and thousands of dialects are spoken in India, in reality, there is a much narrower group of dominant languages, known across wider regions. Typically, an Indian state, even if inhabited by, say, 30 million people – a population that speaks various native language and dialects – would still have one language that most of the people there would know. Examples include Tamil in Tamil Nadu, Bengali in West Bengal, Punjabi in Punjab, and Hindi in several states, such as Uttar Pradesh.

After India gained independence, a part of the political elite believed it would be better to strive for one unifying, national language. Strictly statistically speaking, Hindi is the language spoken by the largest number of people in India. That was why a part of the then-elite, which itself came from Hindi-speaking regions, batted for their language to be elevated to national status. The Hindi-speaking part of the north had been, and remains, more populated than the south, which means that there are not only more Hindi-speakers in the country than those who speak southern languages, but also there are more lawmakers from the north in the national Parliament than from the south. This allowed Hindi-speaking parliamentarians to push for Hindi – while the south was concerned by any attempts at the imposition of Hindi.

As of now, probably more than half of Indians speak and understand Hindi, while less than half speak it as their mother tongue. Moreover, Hindi remains geographically limited to northern and central India: hundreds of millions of people, especially in the south, do not speak it. Their languages belong to the Dravidian family, a group of languages unconnected to Hindi.

Thus, the south and the east of the country rejected the idea of one national language as such, and the proposal of Hindi gaining that status. After many heated debates, it was decided that India was to have two “official” (not “national”) languages, and those would be Hindi and English. While English was hardly anyone’s native tongue, it was exactly this point that those rejecting Hindi, such as Tamils, made. It was better to keep an official language that everyone needed to learn than be limited to an official language that was someone’s native tongue, but was completely foreign to someone else. That compromise meant that both Hindi and English would be used in institutions such as the Parliament or the Supreme Court.

But what of the schools?

India being a federation, most of the public schools fall under the control of state governments. However, education is a shared matter between states and the center. It is listed in the Concurrent List of the Indian Constitution, which effectively means that both the states and the central government have the right and the power to control education – but in case there is a disagreement between them, the central government has the upper hand. This is one of the main reasons of the current controversy.

There is no one language taught in all public schools in India. Usually, the medium of instruction is the dominant, official language of a given state. This is as much a unifying factor on a state level as it remains a solution that keeps all Indians in separate linguistic compartments of the national train. However, every school teaches other languages beyond its medium of instruction. This was used as an opportunity to attempt a gradual, not forceful, national linguistic unification – through an attempt to teach the same language in Indian schools, but only as secondary or tertiary one, rather than the medium of instruction.

In 1986, the central government in New Delhi introduced the three language formula. Under it, each public school in India was to teach three languages. Of these, two should be Indian; one of these would be the medium of instruction of that school (and thus the dominant language of that region, and the mother tongue of many children in that school). The second should be a language from another area of India: thus, a language children would be mostly unfamiliar with. In the south, including in Tamil Nadu, that second language should be Hindi. In the Hindi-speaking part of the north, that second language should be one of the languages of the south, such as Tamil.

Ideally, had everyone attended schools in India (which is not the case) and had all schools uniformly followed the central government’s guidelines (which is also not the case), in time there would be at least one language connecting two Indians from distant areas. In that scenario, a school-graduated peasant from Uttar Pradesh parachuted into the Tamil Nadu hinterland would be able to communicate with the locals in Hindi (which they would have learnt in school) and in Tamil (which he could have learnt in school).

This did not happen.

The current central government claims that successive Tamil Nadu governments have never really enacted the three language formula. Tamils remain one of the most vocal critics of attempts to make Hindi the national language. Many schools in Tamil Nadu, the New Delhi authorities say, have never really taken to teaching Hindi. The three language formula was thus treated more like a prescription than a rule.

In 2020, however, the current central government announced a New Education Policy, in which the three language formula was reconfirmed as the official guideline. In 2025, the Tamil Nadu government fumed at New Delhi for withholding some funds for the state’s schools. This was apparently a form of punishment for failing to adhere to the three language formula.

The chief minister of Tamil Nadu, M.K. Stalin – and yes, he is named after that Stalin – blasted his guns at Prime Minister Narendra Modi, terming the decision unfair and announcing that he would challenge it at the Supreme Court. Stalin’s counterpoint does have merit to it. As mentioned, the three languages formula envisaged Hindi being taught in non-Hindi areas and a Southern language being taught in the Hindi motherland. That way, Hindi was indeed being given an upper hand. A school in the north could teach Tamil, or Telugu, or Kannada, or Malayalam, but a school in the south was expected to teach specifically Hindi. It is thus true that the three language formula’s first aim was to make Hindi the lingua franca.

Second, while apparently Tamil Nadu has indeed not tried to introduce Hindi everywhere in its public schools, it does seem that many north Indian schools did not take to teaching southern Indian languages too seriously either. While exact statistics may not be available, generally, the knowledge of southern languages, like Tamil, in Hindi-speaking North India remains very low. Its inhabitants generally either expect the south to learn Hindi or they expect to communicate via English. By comparison, Hindi has made steady, if slow, progress in the south – not that much in Tamil Nadu, it seems, but in some other states, like Karnataka.

Then there is the issue of the state of Indian education more broadly. As of 2011, 26 percent of Indians were still illiterate. Those would be the people who had not attended a school at all – they had never received formal training in any language, let alone a language of another region of the country. More importantly, Indian schools face a staggering drop-out rate: at the age of 14, a point when education ceases to be compulsory, approximately 40 percent Indian children drop out of schools and never complete their education. The drop-out rates are even higher in rural areas. Coincidentally, it is exactly the age at which many Indian children leave school – roughly a time when one is 13-19 years – that science considers the best to learn a foreign language.

What is really common in India is that those who can afford education strive to make their children learn English, rather than Indian languages. Two villagers from two corners of India may have trouble communicating with each other, but nearly all well-educated Indians can talk in English.

Thus, the current debate on the three language formula signals an old, unresolved challenge in the country: a discussion on which language should be the national/official one, and, if the country should have only one such language at all – or is it fine to just keep English as the lingua franca of the elites?

A point sometimes missed in the discussions on this formula is that no matter how it is framed, it will remain a half-enacted policy at best as long as India’s more general, deeper problems with education are unresolved. The first concern should be to make sure that children attend school, and that they attend them in large numbers until formal education is complete, and that those schools fully function – only then it will be possible to effectively teach Indian children more than one language.