For many years, linguists and others have been calling for the use of mother tongues in education in the tribal areas across India, but it is only recently that a concerted effort has taken place in some states and that central government and government institutions [e.g. National Council for Education, Research and Training (NCERT); The Central Institute of Indian Languages (CIIL)] have been more actively involved in supporting work on bilingual and multilingual education programmes. 7.1 Programme development Much discussion and advocacy work preceded the current move towards using mother tongues in primary education programmes. Now state governments with the support of the linguistic departments of the Universities, the involvement of local NGOs and with national and international MLE consultant support, along with tribal communities, have begun to design, develop, implement, monitor and evaluate multilingual education programmes. In some cases a resource team for each language group has been formed and training is taking place and resource centres for language and curriculum development have been established.        Since 2003 Andhra Pradesh has been working in 8 languages and is currently implementing 3rd grade in Mother Tongue as well as developing training for new teaching methods and for second language acquisition. In 2004 a multilingual education conference was sponsored by the Government, UNESCO, UNICEF and the Central Institute of Indian Languages. Andhra Pradesh hosted a further conference on tribal education and others took place at CIIL and in Delhi. Orissa began developing materials in mother tongue for first grade in 6 languages early in 2000, but these were not followed through in most language groups. In 2006 this experience was built on in 10 languages and the development of textbooks and supporting materials took place and implementation of first grade began in 2007. Assam ran a workshop in 2006 in the tea gardens using the link language, Sadri. UNICEF is now involved in supporting the development of mother tongue programmes. Chhattisgarh held a 3 day awareness raising and planning seminar in 2006 and a curriculum planning and materials development workshop in January 2007. Jarkhand has held an initial seminar… With the backing of international agencies, as well as local, national and international NGOs, the momentum is increasing and experience is accumulating. With the efforts of various academic institutions, research will increase understanding and knowledge of what is required and programmes will be strengthened. 7.2 Project design The project design includes the components listed below, most of which overlap and need to be implemented simultaneously. The design is based on work by Malone (2003) which outlined the requirements for a sustainable MLE programme (see appx 1). The processes followed in developing multilingual education include the following:  Surveys: linguistic and baseline  Mobilisation