Governments of India’s states need to realise that every individual needs to be educated in his or her mother tongue
CHANDIGARH: I am an avid reader of your newspaper and I would like to narrate an incident to highlight the point about education. I was employed in a small town in Karnataka and would often get my car repaired by a mechanic who was a Muslim by the name of Raja . We had planned a family holiday and since I was not confident about travelling in my old car I took Raja along as a driver. While he was driving he kept asking me about distances whenever we would pass a stone with the distance to a particular destination written on it. The markings were in Kannada and English and so I asked him if he was literate. He told me that he had studied till class X but in the Urdu medium and couldn’t read Kannada — but he was literate though by the state’s definition he would probably be lumped in to the ‘illiterate’ category. If I knew only Punjabi and was living in any place other than Punjab I would also be called ‘illiterate’.
The governments of India’s states need to realise that every individual needs to be educated in his or her mother tongue and if they have studied in that language and reached a particular level then they should be included among the literate.
Jagjit Sidhoo
Published in The Express Tribune, September 26th, 2011.
