VP Venkaiah Naidu affirms 'we must protect our regional languages through innovation'

Vice President of India, M. Venkaiah Naidu, has urged for innovation to protect and rejuvenate Indian languages. He said that to preserve languages, an effort into the continuity is required and that is only possible through a cumulative effort through a large section of people in every community. Shri Naidu said that people must unite for the betterment of the heritage of language for our future generations.

The Vice President said that translation plays an important role in enriching a language and has asked for increased efforts to improve the quality and quantity of translations in Indian languages. He even suggested making ancient literature more accessible and relatable to the youth in plain, spoken languages. Finally, he also called for compiling endangered and archaic words in a language from rural areas and various dialects in order to preserve them for posterity.

In a virtual conference by ‘Telugu Kootami’ dedicated to the protection of mother tongues, Shri Naidu expressed his concern saying that if one loses his mother tongue, his self-identity and self-esteem will be also get depleted over a period of time. To preserve our heritage, customs, art and festivals, preserving our mother tongue was of utmost importance. Shri Naidu took a moment to celebrate the recent efforts by Chief Justice of India, Shri N.V. Ramana, who allowed a woman to raise her concerns in her mother tongue to decide a 21-year-old marital dispute. She was a Telugu woman and found it difficult to speak fluently in English. He says initiatives like these would make the judicial system more accessible to the people.

Mother tongue in the education system

Naidu said that the central government’s visionary National Education Policy (NEP) would allow students to focus on their mother tongues and get education from a holistic viewpoint. He said that our culture, language and traditions must be integrated into our education system as that would create pride among students. Those engineering colleges in different states that will offer courses in various Indian languages from the new academic year were also lauded as he said that there was a need to integrate Indian languages in technical courses.