ABSTRACT

India's 'crisis in learning' (Banerji 2014) has been meticulously documented since 2005 by the Annual Status of Education Reports (ASER) - a citizen-led survey of about 600,000 children. The foregoing remarks should be seen in the context of what worldwide research tells people about mother-tongue-medium education. The diversity of India's 'linguistic commons' is being systematically eroded by the language policies of its education system. In the state of Odisha, the coordinator of an education project kept an 'education diary' where he documented the large gap between the enlightened policies of the federal government in New Delhi and the situation in the schools to which the Indigenous Koya children go. An English-medium-only education thus not only gives poor educational results, but it also increases social inequalities. Moreover, for citizenship in an increasingly 'glocal' world, they need a mother-tongue-based, high-level multilingual education that includes English.