TIRUCHY: Playing down concerns over the “exclusion” of Tamil in the institute’s invitation for the 13th annual convocation, IIM-Tiruchy Director Dr Pawan Kumar Singh on Friday said that the mandate was to be “bilingual” in official documents and being a “Government of India institution, we are supposed to follow Hindi”.
Addressing a media briefing in regard to the convocation on Saturday in which Governor RN Ravi is the chief guest, Dr Singh said, “If you examine the eighth schedule of the Constitution, 22 languages, including Tamil and Hindi, are listed. Hindi, however, has also been identified as the official language of the Government of India. So, being a Government of India institution, we are supposed to follow Hindi.”
“Our documents have to be bilingual; otherwise, we will be pulled up by Parliament. My job will be in trouble if I don’t follow it,” he added.
“Any document we create should not be trilingual. That is not our mandate,” he said.
Further, while asserting that Tamil is “not mandated”, Singh claimed IIM-Tiruchy makes efforts to use the language selectively.
“We do training in Hindi because that is the mandate, but we also do it in Tamil.” Taking on the row of the three-language formula, Singh proposed a “seven-language formula”.