Policy, Technology, and Equity: Reimagining India’s Multilingual Development Agenda

Abstract

Linguistic diversity is increasingly framed in global sustainability debates as more than a marker of cultural heritage; it functions as social and cognitive infrastructure for inclusive development. This paper examines multilingualism in India as a test case for what is termed here “linguistic sustainability” — a society’s capacity to keep many languages functionally alive across generations while simultaneously pursuing economic and technological modernization. India’s linguistic landscape, home to well over a thousand mother tongues and governed by a layered and often contested policy architecture, offers an unusually rich setting for this inquiry. The paper connects the mother-tongue provisions of India’s National Education Policy (NEP) 2020 to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), with particular emphasis on SDG 4 (Quality Education) and SDG 10 (Reduced Inequalities), while also tracing linkages to SDGs 11, 13, and 16. Using a qualitative, document-based methodology, the study examines how indigenous languages preserve traditional ecological knowledge relevant to environmental sustainability, and how artificial-intelligence-enabled translation and localized digital content are reshaping access for rural and marginalized communities. The analysis concludes that nurturing linguistic diversity is not a matter of cultural conservation alone but an economic and developmental imperative for the Global South, and it proposes a set of policy interventions for embedding language more firmly within India’s development planning.