HINDI: NATIONAL LANGUAGE?
Image by Harish Sharma from Pixabay 14 th September is celebrated as the Hindi Day. The Indian constitution, in 1950, declared Hindi in Devanagari script as the official language of the union. But Hindi still stands as a second fiddle. It is often looked upon as an optional language in the government offices, especially in the Eastern and Southern states of the country. Instead, the foreign language English gets undue preference. Not to mention that even those areas where officials are adept in Hindi, they prefer to use English for all official conversations. Even after completion of 73 years of Independence, repeated instructions of the Ministry of Home Affairs and several criteria set for the offices categorized as A, B and C, most of them do not meet the standards, when it comes to the directional use of Hindi. A major reason behind this is the mindset, wherein offic