Addressing at the 14th meeting of the Ministry of Personnel, Public Grievances and Pensions’ Hindi Consultative Committee, he stated that this historic move would boost local youth involvement and support regional languages.
In order to ensure the national youth gets the opportunity, the Staff Selection Commision (SSC), which conducts the government job recruitment test will now conduct the test in 15 different languages, according to Union Minister Jitendra Singh. Speaking at the 14th meeting of the Ministry of Personnel, Public Grievances, and Pensions’ Hindi Consultative Committee, he added that this historic move would boost local youth involvement and support regional languages.
“It has been recently decided to conduct the government job test in 15 Indian languages so that the language barrier does not let any youth of the country miss the opportunity,” said Jitendra Singh. He said referring to the Staff Selection Commission’s (SSC), recruitment test will conduct in 13 regional languages in addition to Hindi and English including Assamese, Bengali, Gujarati, Marathi, Malayalam, Tamil, Kannada Telugu, Urdu, Odia, Punjabi, Manipuri and Konkani.
“Notable progress has been made in the last nine years under the leadership of Prime Minister Narendra Modi to promote the Indian regional language besides the official language Hindi,” said Jitendra Singh. According to him the decision would increase the likelihood of candidates being selected causing lakhs of applicants to participate in the exam in their native tongue or regional language. According to Singh, states had consistently pressed for the SSC exams to be given in languages other than English and Hindi.
The government appointed an expert committee to look at this aspect, too, amongst other things (review of the scheme and syllabus of examinations conducted by the Commission). Though the policy was initiated with the Official Language Rules, 1976, significant progress has been made only in the last five-six years,” he added. According to Singh, the Staff Selection Commission just announced the format for candidates to take their exam in 15 different languages, and there are plans to allow written exams in all 22 languages that are slated.
The JEE, NEET, and UGC exams are also being conducted in 12 of our languages,” he said. Higher education subject books still need to be added in the UPSC. Still, attempts are being made in collaboration with the Education Ministry to promote specialty publications in Indian languages, the minister said. In Bhopal, Madhya Pradesh, the first MBBS course in Hindi was introduced to the nation in October of last year. According to him, Uttarakhand is now the second state to start an MBBS program in Hindi.
