Nep 2020 Mother Tongue Mandate: Aspirational Ideal vs. Practical Flexibility — A Conceptual Analysis of Kaying Village, Arunachal Pradesh

The National Education Policy (NEP) 2020 recommends the use of the mother tongue, home language, or local language as the medium of instruction at least until Grade 5, preferably up to Grade 8. However, the policy includes the important qualifier “wherever possible,” which introduces flexibility into what appears to be a strong pedagogical recommendation. This paper offers a conceptual analysis of this policy position by examining the balance between aspirational ideals and practical realities in multilingual contexts. Using Kaying Village in Siang District of Arunachal Pradesh as an analytical lens, the paper argues that NEP 2020 is best interpreted as a flexible framework rather than a rigid mandate. In linguistically diverse settings where multiple tribal languages coexist, strict implementation of a single mother tongue medium may create new exclusions. Therefore, adaptive multilingual practices that combine local languages with regional or link languages may better serve the goals of inclusion, comprehension, and opportunity. The study concludes that the strength of NEP’s language vision lies not in enforcement, but in its capacity to guide context-sensitive decision-making.