Puhazh Gandhi PFor more than 50 years, Tamil Nadu has been seen as India’s model of social justice in education. Its gross enrolment ratio in higher education is 52.3% against a national average of 30% (AISHE 2023-2024); at the higher-secondary level it is 83.4% against 58.4% (UDISE+ 2024-2025); and its literacy rate of 80% is well above the national 74%.TN has democratised access to education, but has education democratised opportunity? Mercer-Mettl’s 2025 India Graduate Skill Index did not place TN among the ten best-performing states. The DMK govt conceded the point in 2022 by launching the Naan Mudhalvan scheme to train 10 lakh students a year in English communication, aptitude and industry skills. But has the state’s language policy kept pace with a global economy, giving every child, particularly the disadvantaged, the tools to compete?Under British rule, English was the preserve of elites. After Independence, Congress govt under K Kamaraj made Tamil the state’s official language through the Madras Official Language Act, 1956. DMK turned Tamil into a mass cause. When Hindi was set to become the Union’s sole official language on Jan 26, 1965, TN erupted. The agitation swept DMK to power in 1967, and the Annadurai govt scrapped the three-language formula. Language had become an instrument of social emancipation and the badge of regional identity.On paper, the two-language policy was Tamil and English. In practice, the energy went into keeping Hindi out. Successive DMK and AIADMK govts expanded Tamil-medium govt schools as a shield against Hindi; English remained a subject, while Tamil became almost the sole medium.The preference was written into policy. TN introduced English medium in govt schools only in 2012-2013, and restricted it even in aided schools. When aided managements pressed for English sections in the 1980s, govt orders in 1990 allowed them only as new sections, ordering that “the existing Tamil medium sections in the schools should not be allowed to be converted as English medium section or closed” and that “there should be no reduction in strength in the Tamil medium section”. English medium pupils alone paid fees. A govt order in 1993 treated new English sections in aided schools as unaided, with no teaching grant and fees “as in matriculation schools”. Madras high court, in a 2012 judgment, found no material showing any earlier policy permitting such sections. Tamil medium was protected by order; English was priced out of the reach of people with low incomes.Ironically, the clearest call for English came from the Dravidian patriarch. Thanthai Periyar, who fought Hindi all his life, argued from his Kudi Arasu writings in the 1920s to the All India Official Language Conference in Bangalore in 1958, that English should be India’s link language. In a 1967 Viduthalai editorial, he called Tamil a ‘kattumirandi mozhi’, a language of the barbaric age, a jibe aimed at its native speakers. He urged Tamils to master English, speak it at home. Tamil nationalists criticised him; both Dravidian parties, finding Tamil pride politically rewarding, ignored the visionary’s call.After 1991, liberalisation replaced an economy of govt jobs and local industry with one of trade and multinational investment, conducted in English. Public education did not keep pace. A study of 2005 national household survey data found that men fluent in English earned 34% more per hour, and women 22% more, than those who spoke none.Madras was among the earliest seats of British power, and its university, founded in 1857, was among India’s first three; two centuries of colonial exposure should have made the state a leader in English. It did not. In the 2011 Census, 18.5% of TN’s people reported speaking English, behind Goa (42%), Punjab (30%) and Kerala (20%). This despite Punjab coming under British rule only in 1849, and most of Kerala lying in the princely states of Travancore and Cochin, and Goa being a Portuguese colony.Kerala, with 94% literacy, started early. Its education rules have permitted English-medium parallel divisions alongside Malayalam since 1969, four decades before Tamil Nadu allowed them in govt schools. By 2023, 57% of its SSLC candidates wrote the examination in English, yet Malayalam remains compulsory under the Malayalam Language Learning Act, 2017, and identity has not suffered. The dividend shows: between 2016 and 2019, 22,260 nurses emigrated abroad from Kerala as against just 2,127 from Tamil Nadu, a State with more than twice its population, mainly due to the difference in English proficiency (India Migration Report 2022). Uttar Pradesh shows the other extreme: literacy of 67.7%, English speakers at 6.4%, and a belated conversion of 15,000 govt schools to English medium. States that paired mother tongue with English early are ahead; the rest are scrambling.Singapore is a classic example. English is the medium of instruction, while the mother tongue, including Tamil, one of its four official languages (a status Tamil lacks at the Union level in India), is a compulsory subject. Its graduates compete globally without losing their mother tongu. Research on bilingual learning by Jim Cummins explains that a strong mother-tongue foundation supports, rather than obstructs, English acquisition.TN could have taught mathematics, science and commerce in English in govt schools from the mid-1990s, while keeping Tamil compulsory. Instead, the govt pushed Tamil further into higher education. In 2010, under chief minister M Karunanidhi, Anna University began Tamil-medium engineering courses; only to suspend the courses for want of takers in 2023. In spite of such a failure, by 2025, TN had translated 23 medical textbooks into Tamil and was exploring an MBBS course in Tamil. Such moves treated TN as if it alone were the job market in a globalised world, a vision contrary to Periyar’s.Parents have moved faster than policy. Union Education Ministry data show Tamil-medium enrolment fell from 65.87 lakh in 2018-19 to 46.82 lakh in 2023-2024, while English-medium enrolment in govt and aided schools rose from 55.18 lakh to 82 lakh.Govt schools still educate a disproportionate share of weaker, rural and first-generation learners. Of the govt-school students on the 2020-2021 medical merit list, 90% came from MBC, BC and SC communities; in 2019-2020, before a 7.5% quota was created for them, barely a handful got MBBS seats.The Dravidian movement’s central promise was social justice: dismantling privilege built on caste, class and inherited advantage. On language, that idea turned counterproductive. Children of professionals, industrialists and senior officials studied in English-medium private schools, while the masses in govt schools were held to Tamil medium by policy. The state, in effect, ran two pathways, one preparing students for global opportunity and another requiring remedial training before they could enter the same labour market.Most jobs are now created in the private sector, where reservation has no legal mandate; only about one fifth of India’s workers are in the govt sector. A quota in a shrinking govt sector cannot be a substitute for the English fluency private employers demand. Without closing the language gap, reservation remains intact only on paper. Tamil does not need protection; it needs confident speakers who can succeed globally without abandoning their linguistic identity. A child fluent in both languages is not less Tamil, only better equipped. The true measure of social justice is not that every child enters school, but that every child leaves it equally prepared to succeed.(The writer is a lawyerand political analyst)
