UGC urges universities to promote 'Learn One More Bharatiya Bhasha' initiative; issues guidelines

The University Grants Commission (UGC) has urged universities across the country to promote ‘Learn One More Bharatiya Bhasha’ initiative, aimed at encouraging students, faculty members, and local community to learn an additional Indian language from a different state or region to strengthen cross-cultural understanding.

The Bharatiya Bhasha Samiti (BBS) has framed guidelines to help higher education institutions introduce new courses promoting the learning of Indian languages.

"Learning one more Indian language is not like learning altogether a new language since vocabulary, sentence structure, sound system, letters, underlying grammar of all Indian languages have a lot of similarities. Hence, learning an additional Indian language would be easy for students, teachers and staffs of HEIs," the UGC said in an official statement.

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Guidelines for Bhasha courses

The guidelines outlines the type of courses to be offered by the HEIs, the target population for these courses, resource material, hiring trainers for the Bhasha courses, and strategies for incentivizing learners.

Language courses to be offered by HEIs

• All students of higher education institutions should have to be motivated to learn at least one more Indian language in addition to their mother tongue and local language.
• “The language courses shall be primarily focused to develop communicative skills in both speaking and reading-writing in the target language,” the UGC said.

Target population for the courses

• The primary target group includes undergraduate, postgraduate, and doctoral students.
• Institutions can also segment learners based on their profile, such as heritage speakers, absolute beginners, learners with disabilities, or professionals needing sector-specific vocabulary. The guidelines also allow Recognition of Prior Learning (RPL) routes.

Resource materials

• Colleges have been permitted to create their own resource materials - texts, videos, audios, situational conversations - for their target Indian languages by using expertise of educators within their institution or collaboration network.
• They can also collaborate with other colleges to develop or share each other's learning materials for offering courses.

Hiring trainers

• Universities will be allowed to hire trainers from within and outside their institution who have different mother tongue, language backgrounds, for effective implementation of the initiative.
• It also instructed HEIs to clearly define faculties and trainers competencies. "Many HEIs will need short, stackable credentials for Task-Based Language Teaching and CLIL trainers to deliver content relevant to disciplinary contexts,” it said.

Incentives for learners

• There shall be inclusion of structured incentives for course completion, mentor effectiveness, or sustainable community engagement.
• Learners who meet declared proficiency targets will receive micro-credentials recorded in the Academic Bank of Credits (ABC) and visible on transcripts.
• Mentors whose cohorts show consistent proficiency gains will receive credits toward a stackable 'HEI Language Mentor' certificate.