At IIT Jodhpur, reaching out has a new language: Classes in Hindi in first year

“At the orientation, when they told us we could attend classes in Hindi if we wanted to, I thought English-section students se peeche reh jaoonga (I would lag behind the students who were taught in English),” he says. So, for a week, he sat in the classes that were taught in English.

“Then I realised, agar yahan baitha toh peeche reh jaoonga (I realised that if I sat in the English section, I would lag behind),” says Bhuvnesh, who then switched to the classes that were being taught in Hindi.

Bhuvnesh, who is from Bilara in Jodhpur district, did his schooling in Hindi medium and wrote the Joint Entrance Examination (JEE) — the gateway to his IIT admission — in Hindi.

“I came here thinking I would have to attend classes in English. I had heard from people from Hindi-medium backgrounds that their CGPA dropped because of the sudden switch in the first year. There was a gap between the English I knew and what was taught in the classes. If I was distracted for two-three seconds in a class, I wouldn’t be able to connect again, and would remain lost for the rest of the class. I was more comfortable with Hindi,” says Bhuvnesh, who completed the rest of his first year in the Hindi section.

He was among 116 students, out of a batch of over 500, who chose the Hindi section in the first semester last year. Around half of them switched to the English section in the second semester.

In the Hindi section, only the medium of classroom interaction is Hindi; everything else remains in English — what the teacher writes on the board, the material displayed on the projector, textbooks, assignments, exams. Students are allowed to switch between the Hindi and English sections at any point in the semester. Most of them take notes in English.

To ensure an equal pace for both sections, the same faculty member teaches the same topics to the Hindi and English sections on the same day.

“Jitna mujhe aata hain, utna hi English-medium waalon ko bhi aata hain (the English-medium section knew just as much as I did). I also didn’t feel the need for material or textbooks in Hindi,” says Bhuvnesh.

At the IIT council meeting in August, Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan urged IITs to introduce regional languages as the medium of instruction. This is in line with the push in the National Education Policy, 2020, for education in regional languages. The heads of some IITs had, in 2021, told an Education Ministry committee that engineering programmes in regional languages could lead to challenges in employment, and not meet industry requirements, besides posing logistical issues of arranging for faculty and textbooks.

IIT Jodhpur is the only IIT — out of the Centre’s 23 premier engineering institutes — to give first-year students the option of classes in Hindi. The institute has set aside two Hindi sections for first-year students, who are expected to switch to the English sections from the second year onwards.

While the JEE can be written in 13 languages, Jodhpur currently does not offer other languages. The institute’s experience with the Hindi sections shows both gains and challenges.

IIT Jodhpur Director Avinash Kumar Agarwal said the institute does not plan to extend the initiative to morlanguages. “We have to look at the language spoken within 500-700 km (of the institute). This is the Hindi belt. It will make a lot of sense if each IIT picks up the local language. That way, we will be able to cater to more people,” he says.

“Of course, we should speak English to be connected to the international community. So, English augmentation classes can be provided. But to become a good engineer, working in India, do you necessarily need English education? The answer is no,” Agarwal says.

He pointed to the challenges in extending the initiative beyond the first year. “Ideally, I would like to. But practically, it is very challenging. The reason is that once you offer education in another language, you need double the number of professors, double the classrooms, and complicated class scheduling logistics.”

Most second-year students The Indian Express spoke seemed comfortable with the switch over to the English sections, saying the first year eased them into the learning process.

While Bhuvnesh said he got comfortable with English by the end of his first year – they take English classes in the first year – Sumit Kumar, 19, who is from Bihar’s Aurangabad said he would not have chosen Hindi in the second year even if he could.

“I don’t want to remain restricted to Hindi. In the first year, I didn’t want my grades to be bad, so I attended classes in Hindi. If you have studied in Hindi from the beginning, the answers are in your mind, but you can’t express yourself in English. The Hindi section helped with the transition,” says Sumit.

Teachers – who have had to work extra since the Hindi sections were introduced – point to why it’s important to help students ease into the IIT curriculum.

Introducing a class of over 50 first-year students, who joined the institute about a month ago, to C – a programming language – Palash Das, an assistant professor in the computer science department asks: “Memory kabhi khali hota hain? (Is memory ever empty?)” The class responds with: “Nahin.” He repeats a question: “Zero-zero hota hain?” The class, mostly boys and a few girls, responds: “Garbage” — a reference to a memory management feature in programming languages.

After class, Das remembers a time when he was in his first year of BTech and the classes were in English. “I was from a Bengali-medium school. I was not a bad student, but I was asked for a simple physics formula in my first-year class, which I couldn’t answer. I couldn’t tell the teacher that I know the answer in Bengali, not English.”

“First-year classes are challenging. There are students who have not used a computer before. You can imagine the pressure. They need to be introduced to one. They are very good students, but the problem is the exposure. C is a different language, it cannot be taught in Hindi, but I can explain the concept in Hindi,” he says.

Teachers point out that in the larger English classes, first-benchers tend to ask all the questions, while in the smaller ones in Hindi, the group interacts more easily.

For Iftikhar Alam, a second-year student in the AI and Data Science branch, the advantage of the Hindi section was the smaller class size, of around 50-60 students each. In contrast, each English section can have over 200 students. “I studied in a Delhi government school, which was an English-medium school, but the teachers mostly taught in Hindi. I didn’t need a class in pure Hindi, but the Hindi batch is smaller, teachers are able to pay attention to us more closely, and it’s more interactive,” he said.

Rajlaxmi Chouhan, associate professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and head of the institute’s Centre for Education Technology, says teachers have for years seen first-year students struggling to cope with the IIT curriculum, given the language barrier.

While the institute has not formally collected the students’ prior medium of instruction, Chouhan says that she floated a form among a section of around 250 first-year students in 2023 (when there was no Hindi section), after which 11 students reported that they were from the Hindi medium, while two said they needed help because they were from the Gujarati medium.

“Of the 11 students, who had four main courses, none of them got an A in their courses; one person had an A minus. A reasonable number of them got B and B minus,” Chouhan says.

Last year, 13 first-year students in one of the Hindi sections had two As and 7 A-minuses among them, she says, pointing to an improvement in grades.

An analysis of scores at the end of the first semester last year showed that there was no statistical difference in scores between the Hindi and English sections, except for the computer science course, where the English section did better, she says.

Himanshu, 20, a first-year student from Hisar in Haryana, says he attended the first few classes in English, and then switched to Hindi. “I couldn’t understand well because I had to convert what I heard into Hindi in my head and note it down. In a Hindi class, I can ask doubts in Hindi, without having to think about converting the question into English,” he says.