August 23, 2026
On August 20, a Supreme Court bench led by Chief Justice Surya Kant, alongside Justices Joymalya Bagchi and V. Mohana, took up petitions challenging CBSE’s decision to make three languages compulsory for Classes 6 to 9 from the 2026-27 academic year, with at least two required to be Indian languages. The Court’s message was notably measured: it found nothing wrong with the policy in principle, calling it an inevitable step aligned with the National Education Policy 2020, while pressing the Centre, CBSE, and NCERT to fix how it was being rolled out.
The practical concerns raised were concrete rather than ideological. Petitioners, including senior advocate Anand Grover, questioned whether CBSE had the authority to frame curriculum for Classes 6 to 8 at all, arguing that fell to NCERT. The bench pressed further on infrastructure: are there enough trained teachers, textbooks, and learning materials to introduce a third language without disrupting students already mid-course? CBSE’s own concession — that Class 9 students will use Class 6 textbooks until dedicated materials exist, and that there will be no board exam in the third language — was itself read by the Court as evidence the rollout had outpaced its preparation.
The more striking exchange concerned terminology rather than logistics. Justice Bagchi objected to CBSE’s classification of English as a ‘non-native’ language, arguing the term carried ‘a very colonial connotation’ and that ‘indigenous’ would be more accurate. The bench suggested English’s long history and deep institutional roots in India — including in the courts themselves — might require it to be examined on constitutional grounds rather than treated as an ordinary foreign language. This is a genuinely difficult question with reasonable positions on multiple sides: English’s colonial origin is a historical fact, and so is its century-and-a-half of embedded use in Indian governance, law, and education — how a modern multilingual policy should classify a language occupying that dual status has no obvious right answer.
A parliamentary Estimates Committee report tabled in the Lok Sabha this week reached a similar conclusion from a different angle, flagging that schools had not been given adequate time to recruit language staff or secure materials, even as it acknowledged the Education Ministry’s broader efforts to promote mother-tongue instruction and multilingualism. That the concern is echoed by both a judicial bench and a parliamentary panel suggests the implementation gap is not a matter of political dispute but of shared, cross-institutional observation.
What the Court has proposed so far is calibration, not confrontation: a possible one-time relaxation for the current Class 6 batch, a ten-day window for the Centre to respond with instructions, and continued hearings rather than an injunction. That posture reflects the shape of the underlying disagreement itself. Few voices are arguing that multilingual education is a bad idea; the dispute is over sequencing, capacity, and how a well-intentioned framework interacts with students and schools not yet equipped to meet it. The next hearing will show whether the Centre treats that distinction as an opportunity to strengthen the policy’s rollout, or simply defends the timeline it already set.
DA Editorial (Sara Debbarma)