A country that teaches in a hundred tongues
India recognises 22 scheduled languages and the 2011 census counted 121 mother tongues spoken by significant populations. NEP 2020 explicitly pushes mother-tongue instruction up to at least Class 5, meaning a teacher in Kolhapur teaches in Marathi while one in Madurai teaches the same Science chapter in Tamil. Roughly 25 percent of Indian school students study in a regional-language medium, and that share rises sharply in rural government schools. Yet the digital teaching resources available skew overwhelmingly English-first.
The English-default trap in EdTech
Most education software built for India was designed for English-medium private schools in metros, leaving the majority of the country underserved. A teacher in a Zilla Parishad school who searches for a ready Marathi worksheet on a science concept usually finds either nothing or a clumsy machine translation that mangles technical terms. This forces vernacular teachers to translate every resource by hand, doubling their workload precisely where support is scarcest. The result is a two-tier system where the language you teach in determines the quality of tools you can access.
Language is more than translation
Generating a usable Marathi lesson plan is not the same as translating an English one word for word. Scientific and mathematical terminology in Marathi, Hindi, or Tamil follows board-specific conventions — the Maharashtra State Board uses particular Marathi terms for biology that differ from colloquial usage. Mentzi generates content natively in the target language with curriculum-appropriate vocabulary, so a photosynthesis worksheet reads the way the textbook and the exam will phrase it. This fidelity matters because students are assessed in that exact register.
How Mentzi handles 10-plus Indian languages
Mentzi supports more than ten Indian languages including Hindi, Marathi, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Bengali, and Gujarati, letting a teacher generate a full lesson plan, worksheet, and quiz in the language their class actually learns in. A teacher running a semi-English section can produce the same chapter in both English and the regional language to bridge code-switching classrooms. Because the output is editable, teachers refine local idiom and examples before printing. This turns the language barrier from a daily obstacle into a dropdown selection.
Why this matters for equity
When a Marathi-medium teacher in rural Maharashtra has the same five-minute access to quality material as an English-medium teacher in Mumbai, the tooling gap narrows. Vernacular-first design is one of the few EdTech choices that directly reaches India's most underserved classrooms rather than its most affluent ones. The goal is not to push English onto students but to give every teacher, in every language, the same head start. That is what multilingual support is really for.