Shillong, May 21: Union Minister for Education, Skill Development and Entrepreneurship Dharmendra Pradhan on Saturday said the Centre is not imposing Hindi or any language on the citizens.

“Who told you that the Government of India is making Hindi compulsory? Show me the circular. Don’t spread misinformation,” Pradhan said when sought for his comment on the opposition from several quarters against the Centre’s move to make Hindi a compulsory subject in schools up to class X.

Speaking to reporters after reviewing the education system in Meghalaya, the union minister said the Prime Minister Narendra Modi had yesterday re-emphasized that all the local languages of India are ‘sacred’ and ‘important’ while taking forward the policy envisioned in the National Education Policy (NEP), 2020.

“Whether it is Khasi, whether it is Garo, whether it is Jaintia, whether it is Jaintia or whether it is Assamese or Bengali, whether it is Oriya, whether it is Telugu, Tamil Punjabi, Marathi, Gujarati or Hindi – all are national languages,” he said.

“(Therefore), nobody is imposing any language on anybody. I am a small public practitioner. I have to go by the prime minister’s policy statement (and) this is the policy statement of the Government of India,” Pradhan stated.

While chairing the 37th meeting of the Parliamentary Official Language Committee in New Delhi on April 7, the Union Home Minister Amit Shah had informed that all the eight states of the North East have agreed to make Hindi compulsory in schools up to Class X.

Shah had also said 22,000 Hindi teachers have been recruited in the eight states of the North East even as he informed that nine tribal communities of the North East have converted their dialects’ scripts to Devanagari.