Stressing the need to promote and nurture one’s mother tongue, Vice-President M. Venkaiah Naidu said here on Saturday that the government should give priority to making the mother tongue the medium of instruction till at least high school level.
“Mother tongue is like eyesight. All other languages are like spectacles,” Mr. Naidu said. He was delivering the 17th convocation address at the National Institute of Technology–Karnataka (NIT-K) at Surathkal.
“Be proud to speak mother tongue like Tulu, Kannada, Bhojpuri, Tamil, Telugu and Malayalam at home and with neighbours. Promote, protect and propagate the mother tongue. It preserves one’s culture,” he said. “ Bhasha aur bhavana eek saath chalta hai .”
Mr. Naidu said that youngsters should feel proud of their native language. The country, he said, was the land for 760 languages. “Feel proud of your language, but do not downgrade any other language,” he said, and urged people to acquire knowledge by learning languages such as Hindi, French and Chinese.
Calling for an end to discrimination based on caste, creed, religion and gender, Mr. Naidu said that while selecting and electing leaders in politics and other fields, preference should be based on “character, calibre, capacity and conduct”. “Unfortunately, some parties have substituted these characteristics with caste, community, cash and criminality, which is very dangerous. This tendency should be stopped,” he said.
Expressing the need to focus on multi-disciplinary and 21st century competencies for future work roles, Mr. Naidu called upon NITs, universities and other higher education institutes to come up with vision documents to achieve the highest academic standards in the next 10 years. “Every institution must give up the business-as-usual approach, change the status quo, and strive to be among the global top-rankers,” he said.
He also asked young graduates to make use of technology that will make it easy for the common man to avail services of the government. The programmes, namely Skill India and Digital India, should become part of a mass movement, Mr. Naidu said.
As many as 1,031 of the 1,545 students received degrees in person. Of them, 32 of 40 students from B. Tech, M. Tech, and Masters in Science, Business Administration and Computer Sciences received gold medals. District in-charge Minister Kota Srinivas Poojary was present on the occasion.
