In his budget speech, Tamil Nadu Minister for Finance and Environment, Climate Change, and Forests, Thangam Thennarasu, stated that even if the state were to lose Rs 2,000 crore, the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK)-led state government would not give up on the two-language policy. Earlier, in February 2025, Union Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan announced that funds for the Samagra Shiksha education scheme would not be released to states opposing the National Education Policy (NEP).
Noting the Union government’s refusal to release funds to the School Education department, Minister Thennarasu said that the state would self-fund the department.
Read: Tamil Nadu Budget 2025: Rs 55,261 crore allocated for education department
The DMK government in Tamil Nadu and the Union government have been embroiled in a dispute over the implementation of the NEP and the three-language formula, which the state considers an attempt to impose Hindi indirectly. Even in 1968, after the Parliament adopted the official language resolution, paving the way for a three-language formula, the DMK government had rejected it and stood by the two-language policy of teaching only Tamil and English in the state.
Speaking in the Lok Sabha on March 10, Tamil Nadu Member of Parliament Kanimozhi Karunanidhi also said that the state would not accept NEP in its entirety. “We had clearly said that the three language policy is not acceptable to Tamil Nadu. The CM [MK Stalin] has also written to the minister and to the Prime Minister saying that NEP is not acceptable to Tamil Nadu in full and that the funds need to be released,” she said. In response, Dharmendra Pradhan insisted that Kanimozhi and the Tamil Nadu Minister for School Education, Anbil Mahesh, had agreed to implement the NEP in full.
Responding to Dharmendra’s allegations, CM MK Stalin released a letter written to him by Dharmendra, which stated that Tamil Nadu, in a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU), had dropped an entire paragraph that referred to the implementation of NEP 2020.
Amid the ongoing three-language policy row, the state government also unveiled the front cover of its budget documents, in which the official Devanagari-based rupee symbol was replaced by the Tamil rupee symbol.
Read: The DMK-BJP political battle over three language policy explained