AICTE: Engineering Courses to be Offered in 5 Regional Languages in Addition to English
Engineering colleges can now teach courses in Bengali, Telugu, Tamil, Marathi and Hindi along with English from the new academic year onwards. This decision has received support from 14 institutions across 09 Indian states who are willing to implement this idea.
Colleges can now offer engineering degrees in 5 regional languages, thanks to the AICTE. From the academic session 2020-21 onwards, the courses will be taught in Bengali, Telugu, Tamil, Marathi and Hindi. The AICTE has already started translating the courses into 11 independent languages. Necessary steps regarding making the course content available in both offline and online mode are also underway.
The National Education Policy (NEP) recommends offering courses in Indian languages. It also states that no student shall be discriminated against on the ground of their language preference in higher education institutions.
A recent survey of undergraduate engineering students conducted by AICTE found that most of the students have expressed a desire to study in their native tongue. Out of the total ug engineering students who participated in the survey, nearly half wanted to pursue their engineering degree studies in regional languages. The maximum number of votes in the survey was garnered by Tamil followed by Hindi and Telugu respectively.
Following the survey, a committee was formed to look into the possibility of providing technical education in the native tongue that was headed by Professor Prem Vrat. The committee responded with a suggestion that at institutions approved by the NITs, IITs and AICTE, the students must be provided with an option to pursue their engineering courses study in regional languages. The committee’s suggestion evoked positive feedback from 14 colleges across 09 states who are willing to offer engineering programmes in regional languages including B.Tech IT, Electronics, Mechanical and Computer Science. The IITs are yet to agree on this proposal and have already pointed out several reasons.
The AICTE has also decided to keep English as a mandatory subject in all four years in order to ensure the students gain the requisite English language abilities and become capable globally employable candidates. Also, the commonly used technical and scientific terms will not be translated into regional languages.
The Joint Admission Board in 2020 decided to conduct JEE Main in regional languages. As a result, the exam is now conducted in 13 regional languages like Telugu, Tamil, Punjabi, Odia, Malayalam, Marathi, Kannada, Hindi, Gujarati, Bengali and Assamese.