[ Badak Yomgam ]

The educational landscape of Arunachal Pradesh is currently navigating a rapid, complex transition. As academic institutions across the state race to align themselves with the standardised mandates of the National Education Policy (NEP) 2020 and Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) guidelines, the practical execution of these policies has brought critical governance questions to the forefront.

While these frameworks aim to modernise and standardise education nationally, their implementation in a socio-linguistically unique state reveals a growing friction between centralised institutional mandates and local cultural realities.

A critical examination of three recent, sequential administrative developments – the specialised direct teacher recruitment for Bhoti language, a central workshop on the Devanagari script, and an intensive Sanskrit teachers’ training programme in Naharlagun- highlights the structural challenges and unintended policy tradeoffs currently facing the state’s indigenous communities.

The recruitment disparity

The administration’s recent initiative to fast-track primary and trained graduate teachers’ direct recruitment, specifically for Bhoti language,highlights a sharp imbalance in localised educational infrastructure. Bhoti, benefiting from an established written script and structured pedagogical resources, was easily integrated into the state’s formal hiring mechanisms. However, this administrative expediency creates an inadvertent hierarchy among local indigenous languages.

For the vast majority of Arunachal Pradesh’ 26 major tribes, whose languages are historically oral and lack finalised, universally accepted writing systems, no equivalent institutional support or recruitment drives exist. By prioritising languages with pre-existing scripts, the current administrative approach inadvertently sidelines oral mother tongues, creating an unequal playing field where structural readiness-rather than community need – dictates state patronage and funding.

The script debate

This institutional gap was further highlighted during a central workshop, which debated the potential application of the Devanagari script for local oral languages. Participants at the workshop argued that Devanagari offers a scientifically structured phonetic framework uniquely suited to indigenous dialects. However, this discussion directly intersects with decades of grassroots script-based development.

Many local literary societies and community scholars have independently developed and adopted modified Roman scripts to document their oral histories, print textbooks, and preserve their heritage. Introducing an administrative preference for an alternative script at this stage presents significant pedagogical hurdles. A script shift risks disrupting established localised literacy efforts, requiring students and researchers to navigate entirely new phonetic systems and fracturing the organic, community-led initiatives that have sustained these languages thus far.

The bureaucratic deadlock

The structural pressures on local schools culminated recently in Naharlagun, where an intensive Sanskrit teachers’ training programme was conducted to satisfy the three-language formula mandated by central educational boards. Faced with the immediate risk of losing board affiliation due to non-compliance with the three-language quota, educational institutions are increasingly turning to classical languages like Sanskrit as a pragmatic, path-of-least-resistance alternative.

Because Sanskrit possesses an established, pre-certified curriculum and fully standardised teacher-training pipelines, schools can deploy it immediately to satisfy regulatory checklists. The unintended consequence, however, is a misallocation of limited educational resources. Time, funding, and teaching slots that could be utilised to develop and formalise indigenous language programmes are instead diverted towards fulfilling a bureaucratic quota.

The policy conclusion

When analysed collectively, the selective recruitment drive, the push for script standardisation, and the reliance on classical language training point to a broader systemic issue. The current educational framework forces local communities into an unsustainable dilemma: they must either adapt their native oral traditions to fit mainland Indian scripts or see their mother tongues marginalised within formal academic spaces in favour of pre-certified classical languages.

This structural approach risks treating the immense linguistic diversity of Arunachal as a bureaucratic challenge to be streamlined, rather than a distinct regional heritage to be protected on its own terms. By attempting to fit pluralistic, organic tribal identities into a uniform central framework, current administrative practices risk compromising the foundational spirit of a diverse nation. To preserve the unique identity of Arunachal, the policymakers must move away from rigid, top-down compliance and focus on resolving the administrative delays preventing local, community-approved oral languages from gaining full, formal accreditation.(The writer is a PhD scholar)