Union Home Minister and Minister of Cooperation Shri Amit Shah presided over the 37th meeting of the Parliamentary Official Language Committee in New Delhi today. Union Ministers of State for Home Shri Ajay Kumar Mishra and Shri Nishith Pramanik, Vice-Chairman of the Official Language Parliamentary Committee Shri Bhritahari Mahtab and other members of the Committee were also present at the meeting. On this occasion, the Home Minister unanimously approved the sending of the 11th Volume of the Committee’s report to the President of India. Shri Amit Shah said that the pace at which the current Official Language Committee is working, has rarely been seen before. He said that sending three Reports to the President of India in the same tenure of the committee is a joint achievement of all.

The Union Home Minister emphasized on three main points. These are, the Committee is requested to hold a meeting in July for implementation of the recommendations made from 1st to 11th Volume of the Report. Shri Shah said that the Secretary of the Official Language Committee should inform the members about the implementation of the volume wise report in that meeting. Under the second point, he stressed the need to give elementary knowledge of Hindi to students up to Class 9 and pay more attention to Hindi teaching examinations. Under the third point, the Union Home Minister suggested to republish the Hindi dictionary by revising it.  Shri Shah also said that after meeting with all concerned Secretaries, an Implementation Committee should be constituted to review the progress of implementing recommendations of the 1st to 11th volume of the Official Language Committee report.

The Chairperson of the Official Language Committee, Shri Amit Shah said that the Prime Minister, Shri Narendra Modi, has decided that the medium of running the government is the Official Language and this will definitely increase the importance of Hindi. He said that now the time has come to make the Official Language an important part of the unity of the country. He said that when citizens of States who speak other language, communicate with each other, it should be in the language of India. Shri Shah said that Hindi should be accepted as an alternative to English and not to local languages. He said that unless we make Hindi flexible by accepting words from other local languages, it will not be propagated.

The Union Home Minister informed members that now 70 percent of the agenda of the Cabinet is prepared in Hindi. He said 22,000 Hindi teachers have been recruited in the eight states of the North Eeast. Also, nine tribal communities of the North East have converted their dialects’ scripts to Devanagari. Apart from this, all the eight states of the North East have agreed to make Hindi compulsory in schools up to Class X.

******

NW/RK/AY/RR