Unesco pat for Odisha’s mother tongue-based education

Bhubaneswar: Unesco has appreciated the state’s approach towards strengthening tribal education by adopting mother tongue-based learning for schoolchildren.It recently released its State of the Education Report for India-2025, ‘Bhasa Matters’, focusing on mother tongue and multilingual education.

The report cited the example of Odisha’s mother tongue-based multilingual education (MTB-MLE) for tribal children as a model that can be emulated by other states.

The report stated that the state’s model showed improved comprehension and retention in children when they were taught through their home languages before transitioning to regional and national languages. “The state language policy prioritises the use of children’s mother tongues in the early years of schooling and as language subjects in higher classes,” it said.The MTB-MLE has been implemented for students of classes I to V by the school and mass education department with support from the ST & SC development department in the state since 2007-08. Stating that Odisha pioneered in introducing MTB-MLE in the early grades among tribal children, the Unesco report said that it evolved into one of the most transformative multilingual education initiatives in India. Tribal children from classes I to III are taught in their mother tongue and Odia and English are gradually introduced as language subjects.

Odisha’s MTB-MLE programme now covers 22 tribal languages across 17 districts, one of the highest in the country. Schools with more than 90% students belonging to a particular tribal language are implementing MT-based MLE.Among the 22 tribal languages, only Santhali has a script of its own, which is called Ol Chiki. For the remaining languages, the textbooks are in the tribal languages but the script used is Odia.Commissioner-cum-secretary of the school and mass education department, N Thirumala Naik, said Odisha’s focus has always been on improving foundational learning for tribal children by using their own language. The state also started the process for recruitment of MLE teachers in almost all the tribal languages, and their recruitment will begin soon, Naik added.