What strikes you as you walk into Bhantola village in Uttarakhand's Kumaon region are the Sanskrit slogans on its walls. The fronts of all houses bear 'Sanskrit griham', while a shop calls itself 'apnnah'. Bathrooms are marked out as 'snanagrah'.

In January 2010, the then BJP government gave Sanskrit the status of second official language in Uttarakhand, the only state in the country to do so. Three-and-a-half years later, from state government offices to the jobs that would have sustained this dying language, little has changed on the ground. Two villages—Bhantola in Kumaon and Kimotha in Garhwal—were named 'Sanskritgram' with much fanfare. Here, people learnt to speak the language with much hope and now wait in vain for the gains that were to follow.

"Yogen jayate muktih (Yoga ensures salvation)" declares a slogan on some walls, while "Sanskrit bhasha newa klishta na cha kathina (Sanskrit language is neither enigmatic nor tough)" says another in Bhantola.

"We have done it on our own," says pradhan Chandra Joshi. "We have not got any contribution from the state government for this wall campaign."

Joshi, who herself has a Masters ('Acharya' degree) in Sanskrit, says the state government has neither started the primary Sanskrit school nor the library it promised at the time of making Bhantola a Sanskritgram.

Such was the initial enthusiasm that even women who had otherwise not received formal education beyond Class V enrolled to learn Sanskrit. "I had not touched a book after my marriage," chuckles Haripriya (42), who has been married nearly 20 years. "I saw the enthusiasm among the women of my village to learn to speak Sanskrit and joined them."

One of the reasons Bhantola was picked to be a Sanskritgram was that its men belonging to the Brahmin caste have traditionally performed rituals such as solemnising weddings, namkarans (naming of infants) and tying of the sacred thread.

Source: The Indian Express, DT. June 9, 2013.