The Andhra Pradesh government will be introducing the English medium in all the degree colleges from the academic year 2021-22. This will be done to improve the career prospects of students.
As many as 2.62 lakh students have taken admission in degree colleges across AP this year out of which only 65,989 students took admission into Telugu medium meaning 75 per cent of the students have already opted for English medium before the government announced its decision, reported the Times of India.
The state government also plans to introduce special training programmes for the degree college students to boost their English speaking and writing skills, the report added.
This is, however, in contrast to the central government’s push for regional languages. The National Education Policy (NEP) 2020 has encouraged studying in the mother tongue. This will be an advantage to those children hailing from rural areas, the government had said earlier.
The NEP 2020 had also suggested that no student should be discriminated against in higher education institutes due to their language preference. It had stated that colleges and universities too “will use the mother tongue/local language as a medium of instruction, and/or offer programmes bilingually” as it will help increase enrolment rate.
Further, engineering courses are now offered in five regional languages including Hindi, Bengali, Marathi, Tamil, and Telugu. AICTE had earlier this year conducted a survey with a total of 83,195 undergraduate engineering students, out of which 43.79 per cent of students said they want to study in regional languages. As per the survey, as many as 12,487 students wanted to learn in 7,818 in Hindi, and 3,991 in Telugu.
Not just in higher education, the NEP 2020 also suggests inoculating regional languages in schools as wee. It states, “wherever possible, the medium of instruction until at least Grade 5, but preferably till Grade 8 and beyond, will be the home language/mother tongue/local language/regional language”. For senior classes, the home/local language “shall continue to be taught as a language wherever possible… by both public and private schools.”
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