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October 31, 2025
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March 6, 2026
Published
June 9, 2026
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Abstract

Interstate migrants in Kerala, India, are marked by their temporary movement. This “temporariness” is often viewed as a micro decision of the household to diversify income and thereby reduce risk. The precarity of migrants in the destination state plays a crucial role in reinforcing this pattern, which is often overlooked. The term “guest workers” reveals the state’s attitude toward establishing a temporary relationship with the migrant. The reduced capability of the migrants provides a context for analyzing and reimagining their children’s schooling decisions.


The study is framed in the context of integrating migrant children into the public schools of Kerala, where Malayalam is the medium of instruction, while native children increasingly move to English-medium private unaided schools. The paper visualizes the schooling demands of migrant parents based on the medium of instruction rooted not just in the instrumental, but also in the intrinsic relevance of the language. This shifts the focus from binaries of helplessness and neoliberal aspirations prevalent in the discourses on schooling quality. An improvised framework of the capability approach analyzes the structural constraints that deprive migrant parents of accessing quality education, thereby questioning a discourse that reduces them to being distress-driven. The study includes narratives from migrant parents and interviews with relevant state actors in migrant schooling across the Ernakulam district of Kerala. The study proves useful as migrant children are filling up public schools in Kerala.

Keywords

language policy in schools migrant parents precarity

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Copyright (c) 2026 Ganga S

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How to Cite
Ganga S. (2026). Reimagining Language Policies in Schools of Kerala: Listening to Migrant Parents Envisioning Their Future Amid Current Precarity. INSTED: Interdisciplinary Studies in Education & Society, 28(1(99), 35–57. https://doi.org/10.34862/tce.2026.1.2
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