21-Feb-2019: President of India unveils statue of Mahatma Gandhi at Dakshina Bharat Hindi Prachar Sabha
The President of India, Shri Ram Nath Kovind, unveiled a statue of Mahatma Gandhi at the Dakshina Bharat Hindi Prachar Sabha in Chennai.
Delivering a speech in three languages – Tamil, English and Hindi - on the occasion, the President said that it is a matter of immense happiness that the Dakshina Bharat Hindi Prachar Sabha, founded by Mahatma Gandhi, has completed 100 years. It has worked for the promotion of Hindi in our southern states. By putting up a statue of Mahatma Gandhi, the Sabha has paid respects to the Father of the Nation in his 150th year.
The President said that learning the language of another region or another state can be very educative. It can open a window to a culture that is at once familiar and new. In Delhi, he had observed cases of north Indian school-children learning Tamil. He said that twinning programmes between different states are popularising the language of one region in another. Such steps reinforce national harmony.
The President said that during our freedom movement, the poetry of Subramania Bharati inspired not just people in Tamil Nadu but all over the country. In the same manner, the liberating ideas of Periyar– one of our foremost advocates of human dignity – were not limited by language or geography. He also recalled that two of his predecessors in Rashtrapati Bhavan, Chakravarti Rajagopalachari, who was our last Governor-General, and President R. Venkataraman, were multilingual intellectuals from Tamil Nadu whose contributions and ideas went beyond any one language or region.
The President said that there is a practical benefit to learning languages of other states. We live in an age when a growing Indian economy is leading to significant internal migration. Young men and women from one part of the country are studying or working and adding value to another part of the country. In such cases, knowing the language of the state or region one is located in can only be an asset. It adds value to an individual’s CV – and it adds value to India.
11-Feb-2019: MHRD takes immediate steps to implement recommendations of committee for the Promotion and Protection of Maithili Language and its scripts
The Ministry of Human Resource Development constituted a Committee in the year 2018 for making a report for the Promotion and Protection of Maithili Language and its scripts. The Committee has submitted its report to MHRD in which it has made several recommendations for promotion and protection of Maithili language.
The report was examined in the Ministry and it has been decided to take immediate action on some of the recommendations of the committee as follows:
- To establish a Script and Manuscript Centre at Darbhanga in any one of the Universities viz. Kameshwar Singh Sanskrit University or Lalit Narayan Mithila University.
- Early completion of the work pertaining to Unicode Scripts of Mithilakshar by Technology Development of Indian Languages (TDIL) and
- To prepare audio-visual teaching materials for teaching the Mithilakshar scripts.
Mithilakshar or Tirhuta is the script of broader cultural Mithila. The scripts of Mithilakshar, Bangla, Assamese, Nebari, Odia and Tibetan are part of the family. It is an extremely ancient script and is one of the scripts of the broader North Eastern India. Mithilakshar had come to its current shape by 10th Century AD. The oldest form of Mithilakshar is found in the Sahodara stone inscriptions of 950 AD. Afterwards, the scripts has been used throughout Mithila from Champaran to Deogarh.
Use of this script has been on decline since last 100 years and therefore our culture is getting decimated. Because its own script is not being used, the Maithili language is getting developed in a composite manner despite having been accorded a constitutional status in the constitution. Keeping all this aspects in view, the Ministry of Human Resource Development constituted this Committee in the year 2018 for making a report for the Promotion and Protection of Maithili Language and its scripts.
17-Feb-2017: Protecting Language Diversity in India
India is one of unique countries in the world that has the legacy of diversity of languages. The Constitution of India has recognised 22 official languages. Multilingualism is the way of life in India as people in different parts of the country speak more than one language from their birth and learns additional languages during their life time.
Though officially there are 122 languages, Peoples Linguistic Survey of India has identified 780 languages, of which 50 are extinct in past five decades.
The twenty two languages that are recognised by the Constitution are: Assamese, Bengali, Bodo, Dogri, Gujarati, Hindi, Kashmiri, Kannada, Konkani, Maithili, Malayalam, Manipuri, Marathi, Nepali, Oriya, Punjabi, Sanskrit, Santhali, Sindhi, Tamil, Telugu and Urdu are included in the Eighth Schedule of the constitution.
Among these, three languages, Sanskrit, Tamil and Kannada have been recognised as classical language with special status and recognition by Government of India. The classical languages have written and oral history of more than 1000 years. In comparison to these, English is very young as it has the history of only 300 years.
In addition to these scheduled and classical languages, The Constitution of India has included the clause to protect minority languages as a fundamental right. It states” Any section of the citizens residing in the territory of India or any part of thereof having a distinct language, script or culture of its own shall have the right to conserve the same.”
The language policy of India provides guarantee to protect the linguistic minorities. Under the Constitution provision is made for appointment of Special Officer for linguistic minority with the sole responsibilities of safeguarding the interest of language spoken by the minority groups.
During the colonial rule the first linguistic survey was conducted during 1894 to 1928 by George A. Grierson that identified 179 languages and 544 dialects. Due to lack of trained personnel as linguists this survey had many deficiencies.
In the post-independence era Central Institute of Indian Languages (CIIL), based in Mysore was assigned to carry out an in-depth survey of languages. However this still remains incomplete.
In 1991 the Census of India listed 1576 mother tongues’ with separate grammatical structures and 1796 speech varieties that is classified as other mother tongues’.
Another unique feature of India is the concept of protecting the interest of children to get basic education in their mother tongue. The Constitution provides” it shall be the endeavour of every State and of every local authority within the state to provide adequate facilities for instruction in the mother tongue at the primary stage of education to children belonging to linguistic minority groups”.
Thus, even before the United Nations declared the International Mother Language Day (February 21) the founders of the Indian Constitution gave top priority to teaching in mother tongues’, enabling the child to develop its full potential.
This concept is in total agreement with the 2017 theme of United Nations World Mother Language Day “to develop the potential of multilingual education to be acknowledged in education, administrative systems, cultural expression and cyber space”.
In 1956 reorganisation of states in India was carried out with linguistic boundaries that had its own script. Sardar Vallabh Bhai Patel, the then home minister played key role in formation and amalgamation of states based on linguistic attributes.
The language policy of India has been pluralistic, giving priority to the use of mother tongue in administration, education and other fields of mass communication. The Language Bureau of Ministry of Human Resource Development is set up to implement and monitor the language policy.
Supporting the cause of promoting and conserving the language diversity in cyberspace, Union Minister of Electronic and Information Technology Ravi Shankar Prasad cautioned the Internet providers “the language of internet cannot be English and English alone. It must have linkages with the local and local means local languages. I appeal to make local languages available for more internet users”.
He said that the ministry has initiated Technology Development for Indian Languages with the objective of developing information processing tools and techniques to facilitate human machine interaction without language barrier, creating and accessing multilingual knowledge resources.
The Government of India under the vision of digital India has mandated the mobile phones sold from July 2017 should support all Indian languages. This will pave way for bridging the digital divide, empowering one billion people who do not speak English with connectivity in their own languages. This will also enhance the capacity of large number people to be part of e-governance and e- commerce.
Despite these efforts by the central government minority languages are under threat of extinction due to multiple causes. In Andaman and Nicobar Islands, the death of Boa, the last speaker of Bo language is one of those instances that have led to extinction of Bo language with the history of 70000 years.
In recent years the language diversity is under threat as speakers of diverse languages are becoming rare and major languages are adopted after abandoning the mother tongues. The problem needs to be addressed at societal level, in which the communities have to take part in conservation of language diversity that is part of cultural wealth.