A migrant kid's story
In the new policy on education, a lot of us are seeing the bright and shiny parts of the policy, but no one is talking about the parts that were changed called language.
Being a migrant kid my whole life, I have always faced undue discrimination (that possibly made me the cynic that I am today). It taught me at a very early age (age of 5), that you are relevant if you know the local language, and if you don't, you have to be perfect in everything else to even matter as a student in a class of average strength of 60.
I am from a fairly well to do middle class family, with access to whatever books and resources needed to "help" me study (because Indian parents, am I right?). Now if you have schooled and lived in a single city for your whole sweet educational life, you will not be able to relate to this, but try imagining for a second on how it might feel like shifting from Delhi to Hyderabad, and suddenly being forced to try to learn the laws of Physics and the logarithms of Maths in Telegu, which the kid is hearing for the first time.
Discrimination is a different problem, with a different can of worms, but I literally felt being left out of education. What happens to the laborer's kid, who cannot afford next month's rent, let alone a tutor for learning the new language. So making the medium of instruction a local regional language would leave out the thousands of potentially bright students whose sole way out of their current predicament was to educate and uplift themselves. This is a migrant economy, and majority of them cannot afford extra help, by just going school, they are already stretching themselves thin. Can all these schools truly cater to the choice? And actually help the migrant kid understand the local language?
Now, let's also talk about the apparently "good" parts. The so called choice? That people are so happy about. This is happiness for people who have no clue what happens in the current system. The choice was also given to us in various points of time, it looked something like this:
Hey student, you can either choose Sanskrit or French as your second language, but there is a catch, we have a Sanskrit teacher but could not afford a French teacher. If you so "choose" to take French, you will have to study, assess, prepare the same by yourself.
So guess what happened? everyone apart from one student in our class of 11 at a certain Junior college in Hyderabad took Sanskrit. The one girl, had to hire tutors and take classes outside the already gruelling 12 hr schooling to successfully partake in the "choice"
My point is the people who are saying "It is in the right direction" are missing out on the the question and feasilibility of implementation, and in the process of this chaos and not so well though out flashy policies, the people who will suffer is a generation of kids whose valuable educational years would be lost in experimentation. The cost is just too bloody high.