Unit 3 Ch 2 : Federalism — Social Studies STD 10 — Question

1. The Constitution of India did not give the status of national language to any one language.
2. Hindi was identified as the official language. But it is the mother tongue of only about 40% of Indians. Hence, there were many safeguards to protect other languages.
3. Besides Hindi, there are 21 other languages (Punjabi, Sindhi, Gujarati, Marathi, Bengali, Oriya, Assamese, Urdu, Sanskrit, Kashmiri, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Malayalam, Nepali, Manipuri, Konkani, Santhali, Maithili, Bodo and Dogri) recognised as scheduled languages by our Constitution.

According to the Constitution, the use of English for official purposes was to stop in 1965. However, many nonHindi speaking states demanded that the use of English should continue. The Central government then took a decision to continue the use of English along with Hindi for official purposes. Thus, the government does not follow a policy of imposing Hindi on non-Hindi speaking states.