President, Union ministers may soon have to give speeches only in Hindi

All dignitaries, including the President and Union ministers, may soon start giving speeches in Hindi if a parliamentary panel’s recommendations accepted by President Pranab Mukherjee are implemented.

Mukherjee has accepted most of the recommendations made in the ninth report of the Committee of Parliament on Official Language. The report was submitted in 2011.

The panel’s recommendation that all dignitaries including the President and ministers, especially those who can read and speak Hindi, may be requested to give their speech/statement in Hindi only, has been accepted, as per an official order.

The President has accepted many other recommendations, including making announcements on civilian flights in Hindi followed by English.

On flights, half the reading material should consist of Hindi newspapers and magazines as “Hindi is grossly neglected by airlines”, as per the panel’s recommendation, was accepted by the President.

The ministry of civil aviation has been asked to ensure implementation of these recommendations.

Mukherjee has accepted another recommendation of the committee that maximum usage of Hindi should be ensured on all tickets of Air India and Pawan Hans helicopters.

The recommendation favouring 100% availability of training material in bilingual at the Mussoorie-based Lal Bahadur Shashtri National Administrative Academy, the premier institute to train civil servants including those in Indian Administrative Service (IAS), has also been accepted.

The panel had asked the ministry of human resource development to make serious efforts to make Hindi language compulsory in curriculum. “As a first step, Hindi should be made a compulsory subject up to tenth standard in all schools of CBSE and Kendriya Vidyalaya Sangathan,” it had recommended.

“This recommendation is accepted in principle. The Union government should form a policy in consultation with state governments,” the order said.

Another recommendation accepted by the President is that universities and higher educational institutes situated in non-Hindi speaking states, where the students are not given an option for Hindi to appear in exams/interviews, must be given an option to answer in Hindi.

In Guwahati on Tuesday, Union minister Venkaiah Naidu urged people to use Hindi daily along with regional languages.

“The Centre is using more and more Hindi in government programmes and policies and we have to make the habit of using the Rashtrabhasha in our day-to-day life, along with the regional languages,” Naidu said while presiding over a meeting of the Joint Hindi Advisory Committee.