Why does India need multilingual education programmes?
Multilingualism is a way of life in India but its complexity generates an enormous challenge for education, particularly in India s remote tribal regions where the languages spoken are different from the languages used in schools. The education provided is often inappropriate for, and even hostile to indigenous minority groups, creating a barrier to learning achievement (Shaeffer, 2003). In order to provide quality education, which takes into consideration the needs of tribal children as learners, it is generally now agreed that the linguistic and cultural heritage must be acknowledged and used (UNESCO 2002). Even though the Constitution of India makes provision for this (1) and the recently published National Curriculum Framework for School Education (NCERT, 2005) strongly upholds the need for teaching in the mother tongue and the use of local knowledge in the curriculum, education is generally conducted in the major state languages. Teachers rarely speak the community language, or ap
