Recently, Delhi university came into limelight because of it’s subjects list when Kerala Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan wrote a letter to the Prime Minister of India , Narendra Modi of how Delhi University is creating a rift between the languages of the south and languages of the rest of India. In his letter he wrote, “It has been reported that several languages included in the eighth Schedule of the Constitution, including Malayalam, are not a part of the Modern Indian Languages list considered by the university. It means they cannot be included in calculation of the ‚Äúbest of four‚Äù marks, which determines the aggregate score for admission into DU,‚Äù
Delhi university in his admission process helps students to identify students to choose their best four subjects from amongst two lists i.e. the ‘academic’ and the ‘non-academic’ list. If a student chooses a subject from the non academic list then an aggregate of 2.5 percentage is deducted from his best four of class XII. The languages which are a part of academic list are- Hindi, English, Urdu, Arabic, Bengali, Sanskrit, Punjabi, Persian, Italian, Spanish, French and German . DU also offers graduation and post graduation courses in these languages whereas non academy list consists of languages such as Malao, Tamil, Oriya, Kannada, Marathi and Nepali. Subject such as Home science has been given preference over these languages.
The stand by Kerala CM has been supported by various parties of Maharashtra, Tamil Nadu and Karnataka. It should be noted that this is not the first incident regarding the rift between the language Hindi and other south Indian languages. Earlier, Karnataka rakshana vedika(KRV) vandalized the signboards of Bengaluru Metro which had information written in Hindi.
Though Abha Dev Habib, a former member of DU’s executive council said that this is an evolving process as a rule which said that it is compulsory to pass in Hindi due to large number of Hindi speaking students has been removed . She also said that steps will be taken to address the grievances of the Kerala CM and that these languages will be given importance in the future.
