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Karnataka govt to make Kannada Compulsory up to Standard 5

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Bengaluru: Just after the Supreme Court ruled that the medium of instruction in schools has to be as per the wishes of the parents and the child, the Karnataka Cabinet on Thursday decided to make Kannada compulsory in all schools up to Standard 5.

The Karnataka government is seeking to amend the Right to Education Act, passed by Parliament in 2009. It wants to replace a clause in the Act which states that the medium of instruction “as far as possible, shall be in the mother tongue”, with “shall be in Kannada”.

“Such a replacement has already been done in Tamil Nadu,” state Law Minister TB Jayachandra said. Jayachandra told sources that the government was aware that this amendment would be contrary to the Supreme Court ruling on the matter. “We are doing it because we want to make our stand on the primacy of Kannada clear, even to the Supreme Court,” the minister said.

“I don’t think they can amend the RTE Act,” former advocate-general Ashok Har nahalli told sources.”They will have to bring a separate legislation on it.”

Karnataka has long been a forerunner on the medium of instruction issue. The state saw a people’s movement in the 1980s, called the Gokak agitation, which fought for Kannada as the first language in schools.

The Gokak report, submitted to the then government headed by R Gundu Rao, recommended that Kannada be made the medium of instruction in all government, aided, unaided and private schools up to Standard 4 in the state.

No action was taken on this till April 29, 1994, when the state government headed by M Veerappa Moily issued a notification implementing this recommendation, giving just two options: the medium of instruction would either be the mother tongue of the child, which covered eight languages, or Kannada. Since then, permission to start schools was given only to those which have Kannada or one of the other eight languages – such as Tamil, Urdu and Telugu – as the medium of instruction.

Contesting this, an umbrella organisation called the Karnataka Unaided Schools Managements Association (KUSMA), along with several others, filed writ petitions in the Karnataka High Court, stating that this notification was illegal as per the Constitution of India. The argument was that a language cannot be compulsorily imposed on a child and the parents had a right to decide what language he or she should study.

On July 2, 2008, a three-judge bench of the high court struck down the notification. This was challenged by the state in the Supreme Court. A five-judge bench of the apex court unanimously upheld KUSMA’s petition on May 6, 2014. A review petition by the state was dismissed on September 9, 2014. Now the state has filed a curative petition, which is likely to be heard in about 10 days.

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