BPSC 69th CCE Prelims General Studies · Question 45 of 144

Correct — C, 576. The figure comes from the Ministry of Home Affairs' own Annual Report for 2022-23, whose paragraph 15.11 reads, in exactly these words: 'Mother Tongue Survey of India (MTSI) project is successfully completed with field videography of 576 Mother Tongues.' The survey is run not by the Ministry of Education or the Ministry of Culture but by the Office of the Registrar General and Census Commissioner, India, which sits under the Ministry of Home Affairs — the same office that conducts the decennial Census, maintains the Civil Registration System and prepares the National Population Register. That is why a language survey appears in a home ministry report at all, and it is a distinction worth holding, because language questions in general studies are otherwise usually about the Ministry of Culture's classical-language list or the Ministry of Education's schemes. The Ministry describes the project's scope in its own words: 'The project surveys the mother tongues, which are returned consistently across two and more Census decades. The research programme documents the linguistic features of the selected mother tongues.' In other words the MTSI is not an attempt to count India's languages afresh; it is a documentation exercise aimed at mother tongues that have shown up steadily in successive Censuses, recording how each one actually sounds. The method is what gives the stem its odd phrase 'field videography'. Speech is recorded on video in the field so that the sound, and not merely a written transcription, survives. Paragraph 15.14 of the same report records that the National Informatics Centre and the National Film Development Corporation are documenting and preserving the linguistic data in audio-video files, and that video-graphed speech data of the mother tongues is being uploaded to the NIC server for archiving; paragraph 15.12 adds that a web-archive is planned at NIC 'in order to preserve and analyze the original flavour of each indigenous Mother Tongue', with in-house linguists editing and arranging the material. One point of vocabulary, since this paper is loose about it: the source counts 576 mother tongues, while the stem says 'languages'. In Census usage those are different units — many mother tongues are grouped under a single language — so 576 is a count of mother tongues videographed, not of languages recognised.

• (a)40 — An order of magnitude too small, and nothing in India's language statistics produces it. The smallest official counts in this field are the 22 languages of the Eighth Schedule and the eleven languages that carry classical status; the smallest counts of any size are the 99 non-scheduled languages and the 121 languages of Census 2011. A survey that spent years on field videography across the country was never going to stop at forty, and a candidate who has any feel for the scale of Indian multilingualism can eliminate this option without knowing the answer.
• (b)233 — A number with no published source behind it in this domain. It is large enough to look considered and small enough to look modest, which is exactly the profile of a manufactured distractor. Set it against the figures that do exist — 22 scheduled languages, 99 non-scheduled, 121 languages in all under Census 2011, 1,369 rationalised mother tongues — and 233 sits between two published counts without matching either.
• (d)984 — The most seductive of the three, because a figure in the high hundreds genuinely does circulate in discussions of Indian languages: the non-official People's Linguistic Survey of India, led by Ganesh Devy, reported around 780 living languages when it published in 2013, and the Census itself rationalised 19,569 raw linguistic returns into 1,369 mother tongues. A candidate who half-remembers one of those and rounds upward lands near 984. But the Home Ministry's reported count of mother tongues actually field-videographed under the MTSI is 576.

India does not have one clean count of its languages, and understanding why is worth more in an examination than memorising any single number. The Census asks every person to name a mother tongue, and it records the answers as given. In 2011 that produced 19,569 raw linguistic returns. Those were scrutinised and rationalised down to 1,369 mother tongues, with a further 1,474 names set aside as unclassifiable; the mother tongues with 10,000 or more speakers were then grouped into 121 languages, of which 22 are in the Eighth Schedule to the Constitution and the other 99 are counted as non-scheduled. Three separate lists therefore coexist and are constantly confused with one another. The Eighth Schedule is a constitutional list of 22 languages, amended by Parliament — Sindhi added by the 21st Amendment in 1967, Konkani, Manipuri and Nepali by the 71st in 1992, Bodo, Dogri, Maithili and Santali by the 92nd in 2003, with the 96th in 2011 only replacing 'Oriya' with 'Odia'. Classical-language status is an entirely separate designation conferred by the Government on the recommendation of a Linguistic Experts Committee, and it now covers eleven languages. And the Census's 121 languages are a statistical grouping, not a legal status. Against that background the Mother Tongue Survey of India is a documentation project rather than a counting one. Under the Registrar General it selects mother tongues that have been returned consistently across two or more Census decades and records their linguistic features, including video recordings of speech in the field, so that the sound of a mother tongue survives even where the number of its speakers is falling. Its older sibling is the Linguistic Survey of India: George Abraham Grierson's monumental survey, conducted between 1894 and 1928, and the modern LSI that the Registrar General's office has run as a regular research activity since the Sixth Five Year Plan, with the volume for Jharkhand finalised, Himachal Pradesh nearing completion and fieldwork under way in Tamil Nadu and Uttar Pradesh at the time of this report.

This is a figure question, and figure questions reward a candidate who can place a number on a ladder rather than one who tries to recall it cold. The ladder for Indian languages runs: 22 in the Eighth Schedule, 99 non-scheduled, 121 languages in Census 2011, 1,369 rationalised mother tongues, 19,569 raw linguistic returns. The MTSI covers mother tongues returned consistently across Censuses, so its count must sit well above the 121 languages and well below the 1,369 mother tongues — and of the four options only 576 lies in that band. 40 is smaller than the number of non-scheduled languages alone; 233 matches no published figure; 984 is closer to the popular 'India has about 780 languages' claim than to anything the Registrar General has published. The second useful move is to fix the ministry. The stem tells you the Ministry of Home Affairs, which is the true and slightly surprising part: language documentation belongs to Home because the Registrar General and Census Commissioner works under that ministry. If you can remember that, you can also remember where the number was published — the MHA's annual report — which is the kind of anchoring that makes a bare figure stick. For a Bihar aspirant there is a further reason to hold this material. Bihar's official language is Hindi, with Urdu as an additional official language, while the mother tongues actually spoken across the state — Bhojpuri, Magahi, Angika, Bajjika, Maithili — are precisely the sort of returns the Census rationalises and the MTSI documents. Only Maithili among them is in the Eighth Schedule, added by the 92nd Amendment in 2003; the long-standing demand for Bhojpuri's inclusion is one of the 38 or so pending demands the Home Ministry acknowledges, and it recurs in state examinations.

• MHA Annual Report 2022-23, paragraph 15.11: 'Mother Tongue Survey of India (MTSI) project is successfully completed with field videography of 576 Mother Tongues.'
• The MTSI is run by the Office of the Registrar General and Census Commissioner, India, under the Ministry of Home Affairs — the same office responsible for the Census under the Census Act, 1948, the Civil Registration System and the National Population Register.
• Scope, in the Ministry's words: the project 'surveys the mother tongues, which are returned consistently across two and more Census decades' and 'documents the linguistic features of the selected mother tongues'; NIC and the National Film Development Corporation are preserving the material as audio-video files, with a web archive planned at NIC.
• Census 2011 counts: 19,569 raw linguistic returns were rationalised into 1,369 mother tongues, which for speakers of 10,000 or more were grouped into 121 languages — 22 in the Eighth Schedule and 99 non-scheduled.
• Eighth Schedule additions: Sindhi by the 21st Amendment (1967); Konkani, Manipuri and Nepali by the 71st (1992); Bodo, Dogri, Maithili and Santali by the 92nd (2003); the 96th (2011) substituted 'Odia' for 'Oriya'.
• The Linguistic Survey of India was first carried out by George Abraham Grierson between 1894 and 1928; the Registrar General's modern LSI has run since the Sixth Five Year Plan, with the Jharkhand volume finalised and fieldwork continuing in Tamil Nadu and Uttar Pradesh.

• Attributing the Mother Tongue Survey to the Ministry of Education or the Ministry of Culture — it is run by the Registrar General under the Ministry of Home Affairs
• Treating 'mother tongue' and 'language' as the same unit: Census 2011 rationalised 1,369 mother tongues into 121 languages, and the MTSI's 576 is a count of mother tongues
• Confusing the three lists — 22 Eighth Schedule languages, eleven classical languages and 121 Census languages are conferred, designated and counted by three different processes

BPSC asks this as a bare figure attached to a named report or scheme, exactly as here, and the paper repeatedly rewards a candidate who has read the annual reports of the central ministries rather than a current-affairs digest. UPSC almost never asks the figure. It asks the framework around it — which Article obliges a State to provide primary instruction in the mother tongue, which amendment added four languages to the Eighth Schedule, which languages carry classical status — so that the item still tests understanding years after the survey concerned has been forgotten.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The Mother Tongue Survey of India (MTSI) is conducted by which of the following?

  • (a)Office of the Registrar General and Census Commissioner, Ministry of Home Affairs
  • (b)Central Institute of Indian Languages, Ministry of Education
  • (c)Sahitya Akademi, Ministry of Culture
  • (d)National Commission for Linguistic Minorities

  Answer(a) Office of the Registrar General and Census Commissioner, Ministry of Home Affairs — the same office that conducts the decennial Census; the MHA Annual Report 2022-23 records the survey's completion with field videography of 576 mother tongues.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  As per Census 2011, the rationalised mother tongues with 10,000 or more speakers were grouped into how many languages?

  • (a)22
  • (b)99
  • (c)121
  • (d)1,369

  Answer(c) 121 — of these, 22 are listed in the Eighth Schedule to the Constitution and the remaining 99 are non-scheduled; 1,369 is the number of rationalised mother tongues before grouping.