Hindi should be an alternative language to English: Amit Shah

New Delhi: Union Home Minister Amit Shah on Thursday said Hindi should be accepted as an alternative language to English but not to local languages.

Presiding over the 37th meeting of the Parliamentary Official Language Committee, he said "unless we make Hindi flexible by accepting words from other local languages, it will not be propagated".

The Home Minister told members that now, 70 per cent of the agenda of the Cabinet is prepared in Hindi and over 22,000 Hindi teachers have been recruited in the eight states of northeast.

"The nine tribal communities of the northeast have converted their dialects' scripts to Devanagari while all the eight states of the northeast have agreed to make Hindi compulsory in schools up to Class 10," he said.

Shah also said there is a need to give elementary knowledge of Hindi to students up to Class 9, and pay more attention to Hindi teaching examinations.

The Home Minister also said that after a meeting with all concerned Secretaries, an Implementation Committee should be constituted to review the progress of implementing recommendations of the 1st to 11th volume of the Official Language Committee report.

He also said Prime Minister Narendra Modi has decided that the medium of running the government is the Official Language and this will definitely increase the importance of Hindi.

On this occasion, the Home Minister unanimously approved the sending of the 11th Volume of the Committee's report to the President, and said that the pace, at which the current Official Language Committee is working, has rarely been seen before.

He said that sending three reports to the President in the same tenure of the committee is a joint achievement of all.

During the meeting, the Union Ministers of State for Home Ajay Kumar Mishra and Nishith Pramanik, Vice-Chairman of the Official Language Parliamentary Committee Bhartruhari Mahtab and other members of the Committee were also present.