Chinmaya IAS Academy – Current Affairs Chinmaya IAS Academy – Current Affairs
- The University Grants Commission on Wednesday held a meeting with international publishers to discuss bringing out textbooks for undergraduate courses in Indian languages, and has set a timeline of six to 12 months for the same.
- Representatives from Wiley India, Springer Nature, Taylor & Francis, Cambridge University Press India, Cengage India, and McGraw-Hill India were part of an online meeting called by UGC Chairperson M. Jagadesh Kumar.
- “We have formed an apex committee to prepare a road map to work towards bringing out textbooks in Indian languages used in undergraduate programmes such as BA, B.Com. and B.Sc. We intend to translate many textbooks into Indian languages in six to 12 months. Subsequently, we will also cover postgraduate programmes. The publishers’ representatives have expressed their willingness to partner in this national mission,” Professor Kumar told The Hindu.
- The course books will be translated into various languages such as Telugu, Tamil, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Gujarati, Odiya, Bengali, Assamese, Punjabi, Hindi and Urdu.
- The UGC has informed the publishers that it would like to encourage Indian authors and academics to write the textbooks in regional languages. It has also suggested that a model needs to be jointly developed to provide textbooks at affordable prices, in digital format.
- The UGC has also offered to provide hand-holding to publishers regarding the identification of textbooks, translation tools and experts for editing.
Engineering textbooks
- The All India Council of Technical Education has brought out 270 first-year engineering textbooks in 12 regional languages, and Home Minister Amit Shah launched the first set of the first-year MBBS books in Hindiin Madhya Pradesh, in October.
- The Bar Council of India has also formed a panel headed by former Chief Justice of India S. A. Bobde for translating legal books into regional languages.
SOURCE: THE HINDU, THE ECONOMIC TIMES, PIB
