Minister exhorts States to ensure teaching in mother language

Ramesh Pokhriyal Nishank inaugurates the new premises of Hyderabad regional centre of Central Hindi Institute

Union Minister of Education and Central Board of Hindi Education chairman Ramesh Pokhriyal Nishank has exhorted the governments of the States to take steps to ensure that teaching in mother tongue formed the basis of academic curriculum across the country.

The Centre was actively considering setting up Indian Language University so that people in different regions could learn languages of different States. “It is important to see that people of the north learn the languages of the south and those in the south know about languages of the north,” he said.

The Minister was speaking after virtually inaugurating the new campus of the Hyderabad regional centre of Central Institute of Hindi. The new building, constructed on a 1,000 sq.yds plot in the heart of the city with an estimated ₹ 5.67 crore, has library, conference hall and classrooms equipped with state-of-the-art equipment. The land for the new building of the institution was given by the State government and Mr. Pokhriyal acknowledged the government’s gesture by thanking the Chief Minister K. Chandrasekhar Rao.

He said the new education policy announced by the Central government would be a corner stone in developing the Indian languages and the States should cooperate in ensuring that the goals envisaged in the new education policy were achieved. He said the new education policy had preferred education in the mother tongue as it was felt that language was not just a word but the spirit which had tradition, culture and values. Steps were taken to strengthen and empower all the 22 languages listed in the eighth schedule of the Constitution and Hindi owed the important responsibility of connecting all these languages.

Hindi was a language which had eloquence and lexicon and it was probably the only language with more than nine lakh words. The language drew from its relation with the 22 languages in the country.

“Mahatma Gandhi said that the nation which does not have an official language is dumb. We shall strive to empower all the languages including Hindi that connects them,” he said. In this context, he recalled how several developed and developing countries including Germany, France, Japan, Israel and others, where education was imparted in the mother tongue, made tremendous progress in the field of research and technology. “We should know foreign languages, but not at the expense of our roots,” he averred.

The Central Institute of Hindi had a major role to play in the promotion of the language and the eight regional centres including the one in Hyderabad should take forward this on a mission mode. More than 14,000 students/teachers received training from the Hyderabad centre and they should be treated as ambassadors of the language.

Minister Ch. Malla Reddy, Central Hindi Institute director Bina Sharma and scholars from across the country participated in the e-inauguration of the new premises.

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