Karnataka Is The Only South Indian State That Prefers Regional Language Over English As Medium Of Instruction, Says Report

Karnataka is the most cosmopolitan state in south India given its linguistic composition yet it is the only one which has a high percentage of students preferring education in the regional language.

Standing first in the south, 53.5 per cent of students in Karnataka prefer Kannada as the medium of instruction.

As per the latest Unified District Information System for Education (UDISE) report, Karnataka is the only state in south India where the regional language takes precedence over English as a medium of instruction. The report looked at data for the year 2019-2020.

Among all states in the country, Karnataka stands second to only West Bengal where 89.9 per cent students are said to be enrolled in Bengali-medium schools, as reported.

This despite the state‘s controversial move of giving a push for state-run English medium schools two years ago. The state started a pilot project of 1,000 government schools in 2019 with bilingual teaching from Class I.

Ironically, for a state driven by Dravidian politics that brandishes language as a huge identity marker, Tamil Nadu has seen a huge drop in the number of students choosing to study in Tamil medium. From 57.6 per cent in 2016, the number has dropped to 42.6 per cent in 2019-2020.

The remaining three states fare much lower with Kerala having only 34.8 per cent of its students preferring Malayalam medium schools. Telangana and Andhra Pradesh both have less than 30 per cent of their students choosing Telugu as their medium of instruction.

Ramesh Pokhriyal ‘Nishank’, who resigned as Union Minister of Education yesterday (7 July), had released the report on United Information System for Education Plus (UDISE+) 2019-20 for school education in India last week.

As per the report, both the pupil teacher ratio as well as the gross enrolment ratio at all levels of school education has improved in 2019-20 compared to 2018-19.