At the University of Chicago Center in Delhi, we believe the most important conversations are often the ones that resist easy answers. Our latest Cool Chat — featuring Dr. Rukmini Banerjee, CEO of Pratham, and Professor Minati Panda of Jawaharlal Nehru University — was precisely that kind of conversation.
The subject: language, multilingualism, and what foundational education really demands of us in one of the world's most linguistically diverse countries.
The Problem We Keep Misdiagnosing
Professor Panda opened by tracing her own intellectual journey — from social psychology to decades of work in tribal education across Odisha and Jharkhand. The shift, she explained, was not in the communities she studied, but in the questions she started asking. Early in her career, she found herself looking at tribal children's educational struggles through a deficit lens: what was wrong with them, their homes, their languages? Over time, she came to understand that the question itself was flawed.
The problem was never the children. It was a system that practised what she calls epistemic exclusion — classrooms that had no room for the ways these children understood and made sense of the world.
Her multilingual education programme, developed with support from the Van Weer Foundation across eight schools, demonstrated that when children's home languages are treated as assets rather than obstacles, learning outcomes improve — in mathematics and science, not just in language arts.
From Data to the Classroom Door
Dr. Banerjee brought a complementary perspective — rooted in the large-scale, ground-level data that Pratham's ASER surveys have generated over two decades. The numbers are striking: over 50% of children in Hindi-speaking states attend school in a language different from the one spoken at home. Yet policy and pedagogy have been slow to reckon with this reality.
Her contribution to the discussion was equally personal. She described walking into a rural Jharkhand classroom and finding, despite her best efforts, that she simply could not reach the children in front of her. The language environment was one she hadn't fully understood before entering it. It was a moment, she said, that stayed with her.
Both speakers converged on a shared conviction: the burden of translation — of bridging home language and school language — must not rest on children. It belongs with teachers, curriculum designers, and policymakers who have the tools and the responsibility to carry it.
What the Audience Wanted to Know
The Q&A surfaced questions that practitioners in the room clearly carry into their daily work: How do you measure learning outcomes in multilingual settings without penalising linguistic diversity? How do you train teachers who may themselves be navigating multiple languages? What does the three-language formula actually deliver — and what does it miss?
Neither speaker offered simple solutions. What they offered instead was something more useful: a clearer framework for thinking about the problem, and a reminder that implementation is where good policy either takes root or quietly disappears.
Looking Ahead
NEP 2020's emphasis on the foundational stage — ages three to eight — gives India a genuine opening to get this right. But as both speakers noted, the policy framework is only as good as the collaboration it enables: between Anganwadi workers and primary teachers, between researchers and practitioners, between data and lived experience.
This Cool Chat was one step in that ongoing dialogue. It won't be the last.
Watch the full session on our YouTube channel.
