New Delhi: In a move to drift away from English, Union Home Minister Amit Shah had made a suggestion on April 7 that people hailing from different states should communicate with each other in Hindi instead of English.
Shah went on to say that Prime Minister Narendra Modi has decided that the medium of running the government is the Official Language, thereby increasing the significance of Hindi.
When citizens of States who speak other languages communicate with each other, it should be in the language of India," Shah was quoted by the Ministry of Home Affairs as having said at the 37th meeting of the Parliamentary Official Language Committee.
However, the Union Home Minister has clarified that Hindu should be accepted as a substitute to English and not local languages. He also proposed that Hindi should be made more flexible by accepting words from other local languages.
Shah also emphasized the need to provide elementary knowledge of Hindi to students up to Class IX and said that Hindi teaching examinations should be payed more attention.
It is to be noted that Amit Shah happens to be the chairperson of the Official Language Committee with BJD's B Mahtab as its vice chairperson.
As per the Ministry of Home Affairs, Shah informed the members that 70 percent of the agenda of the Cabinet is now prepared in Hindi.
The Home Minister said that as many as 22,000 teachers have been recruited in the eight states of the Northeast. He also added that nine tribal communities of the region have converted scripts of their dialects to Devanagari.
Furthermore, all the north-eastern states have agreed to make Hindi mandatory in schools up to Class 10, he said, according to MHA.
The ministry said the committee had unanimously approved sending the 11th volume of the committee's report to the President.
Shah has consistently advocated for greater use of the Hindi language by officials and the youth. He is of the view that India's culture and value systems had remained intact mainly because of the language.
However, the Home Minister's statement did not go down well with the opposition parties. The CPI(M) has slammed him by saying that it is an attack on the core principles of India's diversity.
Congress leader Rajeev Gowda reminded the BJP about Article 29 of the Constitution which honors multiple languages.
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