NEW DELHI: As West Bengal CM Mamata Banerjee raised eyebrows over the use of Gujarati for Joint Entrance Examination (Main)-apart from English and Hindi—the National Testing Agency on Thursday clarified that the Centre has been holding exams in the languages requested by various states.
The agency, which conducted the National Eligibility cum Entrance Tests and JEE-Main tests starting this year, said all the states were asked in 2013 for admitting their state engineering candidates through JEE (Main). But only Gujarat agreed to admit their candidates in engineering colleges of the state through JEE (Main) and requested the paper be made available in Gujarati, the agency said.
“None of the other states have approached NTA to provide the JEE (Main) question paper in any other Indian National Language.”
The agency also said that in 2014, the Maharashtra government also decided to admit engineering students in the state engineering colleges through JEE (Main), so the papers were translated in Marathi and Urdu.
However, in 2016, both states decided to opt out of admitting engineering candidates in the state engineering colleges through JEE (Main) but on the Gujarat government’s request, the agency continued translation of question paper in Gujarati, it said.
“The translation in Marathi and Urdu language was stopped. However, the translation of JEE (Main) question paper in the Gujarati language continued on the request of Gujarat State,” the statement read.