Sir, if you look at the list of Scheduled Tribes in the last Census, you will find there enumerated 176 of them. Of course there are not 176 languages. There may be dialects, in patois form, and the same language may be a shade different in different areas. You might ask me why I have singled. out only three out of 176. Sir, I do not wish that the Schedule should be overburdened with numerous languages and that is why I have selected only three important ones. To deal first with the Mundari language, the first in my amendment, I may say that I have not mentioned Santhali because Mundari is the generic term given to the family of languages sometimes called Austric and at other times called Mon-Khmer. I find that in the last census, forty lakhs of people have been recorded as speaking the Mundari language. In the list or the Schedule as it is. I find that there are included in it languages spoken by fewer people than the Mundaris.
