Editor,
This is to remind the Reserve Bank of India that, as per the 2011 language census, West Bengal, like most southern and northeastern states, is not a Hindi-speaking state and has adopted English as its secondary language, and I belong to this group of people.
The Reserve Bank of India has surprisingly been sending a number of important SMSes to me in Hindi only. I could only gather that those SMSes were about how to save ourselves from online fraud. But naturally, I failed to understand valuable instructions in them. If the RBI has to use Hindi, it should stick to India’s three-language policy. The disastrous path that Pakistan followed to impose the language of its western part on East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) should not be pursued anywhere. It is a matter of concern that one language dies every 14 days as powerful groups impose their languages on speakers of less powerful groups.
The Centre should treat all 22 Indian languages of the 8th Schedule of the Constitution of India equally and refrain from imposing Hindi on non-Hindi speakers.
Sujit De,
Kolkata