New Delhi:  Union Home Minister Amit Shah said that Hindi language is not alternative language to the local languages. Speaking on the occasion of 37^th meeting of the Parliamentary Official Language Committee on Thursday, he said that Hindi should be accepted as an alternative language to English.

He also said that unless we make Hindi flexible by accepting words from other local languages, it will not be propagated. Now 70% of the agenda of the Cabinet is prepared in Hindi and over 22K Hindi teachers have been recruited in the eight states of northeast, said Amit Shah. The nine tribal communities of the northeast have converted their dialects’ scripts to Devanagari while all the eight states of the northeast have agreed to make Hindi compulsory in schools up to Class 10, he added.

He said there is a need to give elementary knowledge of Hindi to students up to Class 9^th, and pay more attention to Hindi teaching examinations. He also said that after a meeting with all concerned Secretaries, an Implementation Committee should be constituted to review the progress of implementing recommendations of the 1^st to 11^th volume of the Official Language Committee report.

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, he added.

Union Ministers of State for Home Ajay Kumar Mishra and Nishith Pramanik, Vice-Chairman of the Official Language Parliamentary Committee Bhartruhari Mahtab and other members of the Committee were also attended the meeting.