KOLKATA: The Bengal government, reacting to the widespread concern among students, teachers and parents over its mandate to make Bengali a compulsory subject for every school-goer in the state, said on Tuesday it was exploring the option of enforcing the three-language formula only for students from classes V to VIII.Implicit in the climbdown was an acknowledgement of the criticism from a section of educationists and panic among parents and students at the prospect of having to study three languages every year from Class I to X. Education department officials, however, said the government had not taken a final call on the issue.“We have taken note of the concerns expressed by all stakeholders. We are yet to decide whether the three-language formula would be implemented for only classes V to VIII or for the entire 10-year school period,” a senior official said on Tuesday. But the government would not budge from its main objective of making every school student in Bengal learn Bengali for at least a part of the school years, he added. “We may bring a bill this assembly session itself so that there is no confusion over what has to be done from the next academic year,” the official added.Education minister Partha Chatterjee himself indicated there was a rethink after Monday evening’s hastily convened media briefing, where he dropped the bombshell. His department was yet to decide the classes where Bengali would be made mandatory, he said, indicating a month-long time-frame to roll out a formal policy on teaching Bengali compulsorily in schools. The time lag, too, suggested a rethink by the government, said officials, who admitted that a series of amendments and legal provisions would have to be made to usher in the revolutionary change that could turn out to be a barrier for non-Bengali students and those migrating to Bengal schools from other states.Teachers said these two sections of students would be left with a “massive problem” if the government decided to ram Bengali through as a compulsory language throughout school across boards. The worst-affected will be those migrating to Bengal as a mid-or senior-school student.The worst-affected will be those migrating to Bengal as a mid-school or a senior-school student. They would be expected to match up to a pretty advanced level of Bengali teaching. “I wonder how many parents with corporate jobs would shift to the state if their kids face this problem in school. This is not the best way of making Bengal a destination for industries and corporates, which the state government says is its aim,” a teacher in a prominent city school said.Another section that would be hit hard if the government opts to stick to the class-I-to-class-X-three-language formula would be Bengal students whose mother tongue is not Bengali. “These students, who have not been studying Bengali as a language, could suddenly find themselves learning a new language halfway through school. This will be extremely difficult,” another teacher said. “Also, why should a Bengali student, who wants to study only English and Bengali as the two main languages for most of school, be saddled with a third language for 10 years?” she asked.All these questions, without any easy answers, may have prompted the more circumspect response from the government on Tuesday though chief minister Mamata Banerjee has thrown her weight behind the three-language policy, making its implementation a foregone conclusion.But there were other less obvious reasons as well for the more considered response from minister Chatterjee and senior school education department officials.One is the Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education (RTE) Act, 2009. It insulates minority schools (schools administered and run directly by minority trusts like the Church of North India) from any state overreach.Another would be some apex court judgments. A 2004 judgment by a three-judge Supreme Court bench, for instance, upheld the Maharashtra government’s order making Marathi compulsory across schools, including English-medium schools run by Gujarati linguistic minorities, but ordered that this be implemented from class V onwards so that “children at a tender age are not burdened to learn an additional language”.Karnataka, though, has implemented the Kannada Language Learning Act, 2015, making the local language compulsory across schools, even those affiliated to CBSE and ICSE.One option for the Bengal government would be to amend the Bengali Official Language Act, 1961, or, like Karnataka, bringing in a fresh law making Bengali compulsory in schools, officials said.School principals welcomed the government’s apparent rethink on the issue. Devi Kar, director of Modern High School , said it would be an extremely good move to have Bengali compulsorily taught as a third language between classes VI and VIII. “A child that grows up in Bengal should know the language. It is fine to start it even earlier. But it should not be extended beyond class VIII, when students begin to prepare for board examinations,” said Kar.Nabarun De, principal of Central Modern School in Baranagar and secretary of the Association of ICSE Schools in Bengal and North-East, opposed the idea of having Bengali throughout school. “In Karnataka, students from classes I to X are allotted a period in a week to get acquainted with Kannada literature and culture. They are not examined on the same. Our students are already learning a third language from classes V to VIII as a testing paper. If the government decides to implement Bengali as a compulsory testing subject from class I onwards, then students will be burdened with two different languages apart from the mother tongue from as early an age as six years,” said De.