Akhila Singh

Tribune News Service

New Delhi, January 9
India’s premier higher education institute Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) has been waiting for a response from the Punjab government for over a year now to introduce a Punjabi chair at the university, the first step towards introducing courses in the language on the campus.

The decision on introduction of the Punjabi chair was taken on August 6, 2004, as part of Centre for Indian Languages (CIL) at the university’s School of Language and was conveyed to the state government the same year.

University sources said the JNU administration had decided to introduce courses in Tamil, Punjabi and Bengali as part of the extension plan of CIL that earlier offered courses only in Hindi and Urdu. While the Tamil Nadu government funded the Tamil chair, the university had to fund the Bengali chair from its own resources.

A proposal to introduce the Punjabi chair was sent to the then Punjab Chief Minister Capt Amarinder Singh, but it was only the present government that showed interest in 2008. Taking a note of the letter written by former Vice-Chancellor Prof GK Chadha to the state government, Anjali Bhawra from the Punjab government’s department of higher education wrote to the JNU on October 24, 2008, asking them for the estimated cost of the chair along with the activities associated with it.

In a reply to the letter, JNU administration wrote that an “amount of Rs 3 crore may be required as a one time endowment, so that the interest earned could be used for the funding of the chair”. A copy of the letter is available with The Tribune.

The main aim of setting the chair was to enable the Punjabi students to relate the knowledge of the language and literature to other modern Indian languages. Another important objective was to introduce the non-Punjabi speakers to the history, traditions and distinctive features of the language, said Prof Chaman Lal, chairman, CIL.

The JNU proposed that the funds for setting up this chair would be utilised to sponsor the chair of a professor, assistant professor and a stenographer-cum-computer operator. Under the proposal, the Punjab government was also given an option to opt for yearly grants if it was not interested in releasing the funds in a single go.