The National Education Policy (NEP) has dropped Mandarin or ‘Chinese’ from its list of examples of foreign languages that can be taught in schools. The language was included in the draft version of the Policy released in May 2019, but was missing from the final Policy document approved by the Union Cabinet this week.
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Senior officials told The Hindu that over the past year, consultations have been held on the issue between the Ministries of Human Resource Development (MHRD) and External Affairs (MEA), with security concerns raised regarding Mandarin teaching to Indian students.
“A choice of foreign language(s) (e.g. French, German, Spanish, Chinese, Japanese) would be offered and available to interested students to choose as elective(s) during secondary school,” said the draft Policy document. Mandarin is the language most commonly spoken in China.
Over the course of a year of rising India-China tensions, that sentence was changed. “In addition to high quality offerings in Indian languages and English, foreign languages, such as Korean