New Delhi: Union Home Minister Amit Shah was on Monday unanimously re-elected as the chairperson of the Parliamentary Committee on Official Language.
A meeting of the committee was held here to reconstitute the Parliamentary Committee on Official Language. During the meeting, Shah was elected as the chairperson of the committee. He has also served as the chairperson of the committee from 2019 to 2024, an official statement said.
The Home Minister expressed his gratitude to all the members of the Parliamentary Committee on Official Language for unanimously re-electing him as the Chairperson.
In his address, Shah said for the last 75 years “we have been working to promote the official language, but in the last 10 years there has been a slight change in its method”.
He said that KM Munshi and NG Iyengar had decided after consultation with many people that in order to accept Hindi as the official language and to promote it in government work, Hindi should not compete with any local language.
Shah said in the last 10 years, the Committee has continuously tried that Hindi becomes a friend of all local languages and it does not compete with anyone.
“We should take care that the speakers of any local language do not have any inferiority complex, and Hindi should generally be accepted as the language of work with consensus and agreement,” Shah said.
He said the government has created a Shabdkosh (dictionary) and, in collaboration with the education department, added thousands of words from local languages to Hindi. There were many words whose synonyms were not available in Hindi, but by accepting many words from other languages, we not only enriched Hindi and made it flexible but also strengthened the relationship between that particular language and Hindi.
Shah said the Department of Official Language is developing such software that will automatically translate all the languages of the 8th Schedule on a technical basis.
The Home Minister said cooperation and acceptance should be the two basic foundations of our work.
He said, “We have to move forward with such a goal that on Independence Day in 2047, our country’s entire work will be done in Indian languages with pride. We have to give a new life to the 1000-year-old Hindi language, make it accepted, and try to complete the task left before us by the freedom fighters.”
Shah said that by giving new life to a language that is thousands of years old and increasing its acceptance, we must fulfil the dream of the visionaries of the freedom movement.
The Home Minister said Hindi is now in a way associated with employment and technology, and the Government of India is also making special efforts to integrate all the new age technologies with the Hindi language.
In the new education policy, a resolution has been taken to give importance to all mother tongues; this committee will take it much further, Shah added.
The newly appointed MPs from the Rajya Sabha and Lok Sabha were also present in the meeting.
