Union Home Minister Amit Shah on Thursday said that Hindi should be accepted as an alternative to English and not to local languages.

"Prime Minister Narendra Modi, has decided that the medium of running the government is the Official Language and this will definitely increase the importance of Hindi. Now the time has come to make the Official Language an important part of the unity of the country,"the Union Home Ministry quoted Shah as having said at the 37th meeting of the Parliamentary Official Language Committee in New Delhi on Thursday.

The Union Home Minister noted, "When citizens of states who speak other language, communicate with each other, it should be in the language of India. Unless we make Hindi flexible by accepting words from other local languages, it will not be propagated."

Shah stressed on the need to give elementary knowledge of Hindi to students up to Class IX and pay more attention to Hindi teaching examinations.

The Union Home Minister informed that 22,000 Hindi teachers have been recruited in the eight states of Northeast India.

Nine tribal communities of the Northeast have converted their dialects’ scripts to Devanagari. Apart from this, all the eight states of the Northeast have agreed to make Hindi compulsory in schools up to Class X, the Home Minister said.

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