Press Council of India Chairman Justice Markandey Katju’s visit to Hyderabad is marked with many comments of Katju on journalism, minimum required qualification of journalists, mediums in the schools, police atrocities on the Editor of Tamilnadu paper Thinabhoomi, fighting for the prisoners in remand waiting for the justice and so on.
He attended a program ‘Urdu Virasat Carvan’ organized by Andhra Pradesh Urdu Academy yesterday, in which the Chief Minister of Andhra Pradesh Kiran Kumar Reddy also attended.
As the subject was Urdu, Kiran Kumar Reddy expressed his desire to conduct a World Urdu Conference as World Telugu Conference conducted recently at Tirupati that became very successful. But, the chief minister observes, the Muslim communities are opting for English medium because of lack of opportunities for Urdu medium students. The only Urdu medium school in pileru, his own constituency in Chittore District has been asked to convert in to Englhish medium.
Then Markandey Katju requested Kiran Kumar Reddy to make Urdu and Sanskrit compulsory in the schools from class 3 to 7 which can be optional from 8th standard onwards. Urdu and Sanskrit, he added, are the cultural languages at National level. He said that a wrong notion is prevailing that Sanskrit is a Hindu language. But, he clarified, that the religious connotations occupy only a small portion of the language.
AW-SriJa
