By Md. Ali, TwoCircles.net,
New Delhi: If your medium of study in higher education is Urdu, as is the case with thousands of students in India, then chances are that you won’t be able to appear for National Eligibility Test (NET) because the University Grants Commission (UGC) doesn’t provide question papers of NET in Urdu language.
This information was provided by the UGC, the government body which formulates policies regarding higher education in India, to RTI activist Afroz Alam Sahil as a reply to his RTI query.
The website of the UGC describes NET as a test which determines “eligibility for lectureship and for award of Junior Research Fellowship (JRF) for Indian nationals in order to ensure minimum standards for the entrants in the teaching profession and research.”
There are several institutions of higher learning in India where Urdu is one of the mediums of instruction, including Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi and Jamia Hamdard. Now because the UGC, which conducts NET, doesn’t provide the question papers of NET in Urdu language, thousands of students are compelled to either avoid appearing in the Test or leave the language and take recourse to English as the medium of examination.
The absence of question papers in Urdu has been affecting the overall career of thousands of students. Besides, it has been having a very negative impact on the propagation of the language among the coming generation, which tends to avoid choosing Urdu as the medium of instruction.
“As I remember, till almost 5 years back, Urdu used to be one of the mediums of UGC-Net exam. It has happened probably after 2005 that UGC stopped Urdu as one of the mediums of the Test,” Prof Akhtarul Wasey, vice-chairman of Urdu Acadamy, Delhi, told TwoCircles.net.
Calling it as “one of the most unfortunate decisions by the UGC”, Mr. Wasey said the decision is unfair to the students who have opted Urdu as their medium of study, because the language in this context is just a medium. “They should be given equal opportunity,” he demanded.
It becomes all the more unfair when there is not enough study material available in Hindi language, another medium besides English in which one can appear in UGC-NET, argued Prof. Wasey, who is Director, Zakir Husain Institute of Islamic Studies, Jamia Millia Islamia.
Prof. Wasey informed he wrote letters to in-charge of the NET exam and UGC chairman in this regard but to his disappointment, he got no response from them.
But according to Mr. Wasey, the problem lies elsewhere. The problem is the silence of the people and institutions which are otherwise expected to raise a united voice against this: “Why will the UGC be concerned about Urdu when we ourselves aren’t concerned about it?”
Mr. Wasey who has also been very active in the propagation of the language, finds himself a lone voice against this step of the UGC. He wrote several letters to different institutions across the country but didn’t get any response from them.
Most contradictory aspect of the whole issue is that when the UGC has allowed Urdu as the medium of instruction then why it has not allowed the language as the medium at NET? One wonders about this lack of co-ordination when it comes to the treatment to the language which was the product of Ganga Jamuni Tehzeeb, the syncretic culture and tradition in India.
Urdu is one of the officially recognized languages in the country and according to 2001 census; it is spoken by more than 52 million people in this country. It is the official language of five states, Utter Pradesh, Bihar, Andhra Pradesh, Jammu and Kashmir and Delhi.
Recently, on the instructions of the ministry of Human Resource and Development, National Council for Promotion of Urdu Language (NCUPL) has prepared an approach paper for the development of Urdu language which will be presented before the XII Five Year Plan (1012-1017). That approach paper urgently needs to suggest the government to include Urdu as the medium of writing NET.