Mother tongue survey of India

Context:

Recently the Ministry of Home Affairs has completed the Mother Tongue Survey of India with field videography of the country’s 576 languages.

What is Mother Tongue Survey of India:

The Mother Tongue Survey of India is a project that “surveys the mother tongues, which are returned consistently across two and more Censu decades.
It also documents the linguistic features of the selected languages.
The NIC and the National Film Development Corporation will document the linguistic data of the surveyed mother tongues in audio video files.
Video-graphed speech data of mother tongues will also be uploaded on the NIC survey for archiving purposes.

What is status of mother tongue in India:

As per an analysis of 2011 linguistic census data in 2018, more than 19,500 languages or dialects are spoken in India as mother tongues.
The category “mother tongue” is a designation provided by the respondent, but it need not be identical with the actual linguistic medium.
After subjecting the 19,569 returns to linguistic scrutiny, edit and rationalisation, they were grouped into 121 mother tongues.
According to the 2011 linguistic census, Hindi is the most widely spoken mother tongue, with 8 crore people or 43.6 percent of the population declaring it as the mother tongue.
The next highest is Bengali as mother tongue for 7 crore individuals, and accounting for 8 percent of the population

What is the status of Mother tongue in the education of children:

The new National Curriculum Framework for the foundational stages of education, has recommended that mother tongue should be the primary medium of instruction in schools for children up to eight years of age.
The new NCF, which deals with pre-school and classes I-II, emphasises the virtues of the mother tongue as the primary medium of instruction, saying that by the time children join pre-school, they acquire significant competence in the “home language”.
According to the NCF, evidence from research confirms the importance of teaching children in their mother tongue during the foundational years and beyond.
NCF also states that since children learn concepts most rapidly and deeply in their home language, the primary medium of instruction would optimally be the child’s mother tongue in the Foundational Stage.