Union Home Minister Amit Shah on Thursday said when citizens of States who speak other languages communicate with each other, it should be in the language of India, stressing that Hindi should be accepted as an alternative to English and not as an alternative to local languages.

Mr. Shah, who is the chairman of the Parliamentary Official Language Committee, informed members that 70% of the agenda of the Union Cabinet was now prepared in Hindi.

A statement from the Ministry of Home Affairs, quoting Mr. Shah, said Prime Minister Narendra Modi had decided that the medium of running the government would be the Official Language and this would definitely increase the importance of Hindi. He said now the time had come to make the Official Language an important part of the unity of the country and added that when citizens of States who speak other language communicate with each other, it should be in the language of India.

Mr. Shah said Hindi should be accepted as an alternative to English and not to local languages. He noted that unless we made Hindi flexible by accepting words from other local languages, it would not be propagated.

Mr. Shah said that 22,000 Hindi teachers had been recruited in the eight States of the North East. Also, nine tribal communities of the North East had converted their dialects’ scripts to Devanagari and all the eight States of the North East had agreed to make Hindi compulsory in schools up to Class X.

Mr. Shah presided over the 37th meeting of the Parliamentary Official Language Committee. Vice-Chairman of the Committee, Bhritahari Mahtab was also present.