© The Indian Express Pvt Ltd
Tags:
Journalism of Courage
Launching textbooks written in Hindi for MBBS students, Union Home Minister Amit Shah said at a function in Bhopal on Sunday that in accordance with Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s vision, Indian languages are now being given more importance.
As part of the Madhya Pradesh government’s project to provide medical education in Hindi, Shah launched Hindi textbooks for anatomy, biochemistry and physiology for first-year MBBS students.
Shah said that Modi is changing “brain drain” into “brain gain” by enabling students to pursue medical and technical education in Hindi and other regional languages.
Addressing the hundreds of students who attended the event, Shah emphasised the significance of the introduction of Hindi textbooks for medical education, and called it a moment of reawakening and reconstruction in the field of education in the country.
“Prime Minister Modi has embarked on a mission of providing medical and engineering education in all languages, including Hindi, Marathi, Tamil, Telugu, Gujarati, Malayalam, Bengali. As per the Prime Minister’s vision, our languages are being given importance, and entrance for medical colleges held through NEET (National Eligibility cum Entrance Test), entrance for engineering through JEE (Joint Entrance Examination), and those in undergraduate courses are being conducted in 12 languages,” he said.
Shah congratulated Madhya Pradesh Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan, saying that he has taken the lead in fulfilling the PM’s vision by providing medical education in Hindi.
“Every man’s thinking process is in their mother tongue, and therefore, as Nelson Mandela had said, ‘If you talk to someone in a language, it reaches their brain. But if you talk to the person in their mother tongue, it reaches the person’s heart’…,” he said.
He also accused those interested in promoting English of wrongly attributing English to intellectual ability.
Chief Minister Chouhan said students from socially and economically weaker backgrounds were being adversely affected by the teaching of engineering and medicine in English.
“Work for introducing education in Hindi should have been done immediately after Independence. Those who had the responsibility of running the government after Independence, they sinned by making India used to the language of the colonisers. It led to a thought process that without English, one cannot be successful. These people (post-Independence governments) had English in their heart, mind and soul. They created an environment where speaking English will get you respect,” Chouhan said.
