Home Minister Amit Shah stays chief of language panel

Home Minister Amit Shah has unanimously been re-elected chairperson of the Parliamentary Committee on Official Language. The decision was taken at a meeting to reconstitute the committee on Monday.

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The Home Minister, who has been the chairperson of the committee since 2019, expressed gratitude to the members. He said for the past 75 years, the government had been working to promote the official language, but in the past 10 years there had been a slight shift in its method after the NDA government came to power.

Shah said in the past 10 years, the committee had strived to make Hindi a friend of all local languages and ensure it didn’t compete with other languages.

It should be ensured speakers of local languages didn’t face an inferiority complex and that Hindi was generally accepted as the language of work with consensus and agreement, he said.

The Department of Official Language was developing a software to automatically translate all languages of the 8th Schedule on a technical basis. Once the work was complete, Hindi would gain acceptance and gradually evolve in the daily work culture, said Shah.

Over the past five years, the committee had worked hard and given three large volumes of its report to the President, which had never happened before, he added.