Google's CEO, Sundar Pichai, has found himself at the center of a debate in Tamil Nadu concerning the three-language policy. The discussion focuses on whether Pichai, who hails from Tamil Nadu, actually learned Hindi during his school years in the region.
He attended Jawahar Vidyalaya and Vana Vani Matriculation Higher Secondary School, both located on the Indian Institute of Technology Madras (IIT-M) campus, before pursuing engineering at IIT Kharagpur. Pichai completed his education in the 1980s, during which he studied Hindi as a third language. At that time, Jawahar Vidyalaya adhered to the matriculation syllabus that included Hindi; however, it switched to the CBSE syllabus in the late 1990s.
Critics of the three-language policy have pointed to successful engineers and professionals from Tamil Nadu who only studied English and Tamil in school. Recently, Tamil Nadu's Information Technology Minister PT R Palanivel Thiagarajan brought Sundar Pichai into the heated debate, questioning whether the Google CEO's lack of Hindi knowledge has impacted his career.
"This three-language approach is a flawed model, and we should consider adopting a more effective two-language system instead. Sundar Pichai, the CEO of Alphabet, has stated that he doesn't know Hindi. Has this lack of Hindi proficiency affected his success?" Thiagarajan posed. In response, BJP leaders and supporters criticized the DMK minister, sharing an old video of Pichai where he mentioned learning Hindi in school. They argued that private schools have been implementing the three-language policy since the 1980s. Additionally, some BJP accounts shared a clip of Pichai speaking Hindi, where he remarked, "I am from the South, and I come from Chennai. I learned Hindi in school, but I never used it much".
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