DU organised national seminar on ‘Higher Education through Indian Language Medium: Challenges and Prospects’

NEW DELHI: The University of Delhi, Department of Punjabi, in collaboration with Bharatiya Bhasha Samiti, Ministry of Education organised a one-day national seminar on ‘Higher Education through Indian Language Medium: Challenges and Prospects’ on February 28, 2023.

The inaugural session of the seminar commenced with the speech of Kuldeep Chand Agnihotri, Former Vice-Chancellor, Central University, Himachal Pradesh. He highlighted the dominance of English as the international language over our education as well as our thinking. In his words, language is a matter of practice, it has nothing to do with knowledge.

Further Professor Ravi Tek Chandani, marked the importance of evaluating the theory from a practical. He represented the major challenge of deciding the medium of education in a particular region.

As the keynote address, Professor Garish Nath Jha, Chairman, Scientific and Technical Vocabulary Commission, Government of India, presented views on education in a multilingual society with reference to the New Education Policy 2020. He also spoke about the technological development of the 22 Indian languages and their scripts. He emphasized that it is more important to spread and promote languages through the internet by including Indian languages in technical programmes.

Commenting on the beauty of diverse Indian languages, Professor Balram Panni, Dean of Colleges, University of Delhi emphasized understanding the ethics, knowledge and value of language along with the responsibility of one-self towards their mother language. He also said that saving language from getting on the verge of being extinct is one of the major need of the time as Indian ancient knowledge in itself is very much scientific and require it to be preserved.

Professor Kapil Kapur, Ex-Professor, Vice-Chancellor, Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi attended the event as a special guest. Appreciating the initiative of NEP 2020 towards streaming Indian knowledge in the centre of Indian Education, he stated about the common sound structure of the alphabets, on basis of which different languages have been framed. He criticized the sad reality of the domination of the English language at higher institutions like the judiciary which actually makes Indians prisoners. Highlighting the errors of NEP 2020, Professor Kapur concluded the primary session of the seminar by presenting a proposal for constructing Indian medium school parallel to English medium school.

As per the official release of DU, the presidency of the second academic session was watched by Professor Jagbir Singh, Chancellor, Central University Punjab. Gyaneshwar M Mule, Member, National Human Rights Commission, India and former Indian High Commissioner, Maale, Maldives was seen as the chief guest who spoke about the legacy of Indian languages.

Professor D Uma Devi, Department of Modern Indian Languages and Literary Studies, University of Delhi spoke about boycotting the external languages taking over the Indian languages and favoured bringing the past into the contemporary situations.

On the similar platform, Professor Amitabh Chakraborty, Dean, Faculty of Arts, Delhi University highlighted the two needful changes of the time, which include empowering translations of texts in Indian languages and promotion and security of vernacular schools.