AHMEDABAD: If a student reads, speaks, and thinks in the mother tongue, it will enhance his reasoning power. His capability to analyze, and research will naturally emerge from within, said Union Home Minister Amit Shah while addressing a gathering at the 95th anniversary of Sheth GC High School at Vijapur city in the Mehsana district of Gujarat on Saturday.
He said work was underway to translate into regional languages the syllabi of technical, medical, and higher education courses. The new National Education Policy (NEP) will make India number one in the education sector in the next 25 years. “The fundamental change in the NEP is to educate students in their mother tongue at the primary and secondary level as far as possible. I am confident in the next few years, all the students in the country will be imparted education in their mother tongue and their mothers will be able to teach them in their language,” he said.
Along with this, the syllabi of technical, medical, and higher education are being translated into the mother tongue, Shah said. Medical education in Bhopal was being imparted in Hindi after the translation of the syllabus of the first semester, he added.
“Higher medical education courses will begin in Gujarati, Telugu, Odia, Punjabi, and Bengali. From there, India will begin to contribute significantly to research and development,” he said. Shah said a person is able to have original thinking only when the subject he is pursuing is taught in his mother tongue. “The new education policy will help provide a platform for a child’s inherent capacities like in art and music,” he said.
Contrasting the NEP against the colonial British rule, Shah said: “Under the British education policy for pre-Independent India, rote learning was a sign of intelligence, but students did not have the power to think, research, reason, analyze,decide and understand,which created many issues in the society.”