IIT Kanpur has announced the establishment of a centre aimed at seamless integration of students from Hindi and other Indian languages (OILs) backgrounds. The centre will guide the students from across the country with a non-English medium of instruction at school.
The newly-instituted Shivani Centre for the nurture and re-integration of Hindi and other Indian languages at IIT Kanpur will ensure the availability of the course content in regional languages to overcome the challenge of restricted job opportunities at the end of the academic programme.
Students with an Indian language background are also known to face serious challenges such as social integration with their peers. Because of the language barrier, the students are unable to take advantage of the opportunities for their academic and personal growth.
One of the main objectives of the Shivani Centre is to mainly focus on offering students, with opportunities for self-expression and personal growth, guarding them against the feelings of exclusion and isolation, while allowing them to gradually integrate with a socio-academic milieu of the institute.
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Further, the centre will try to address these issues not only at the institute level but also in the context of higher education in the country, by facilitating the creation of academic resources (STEM content, textbooks, references, digital tools) in languages other than English.
IIT Kanpur will establish the center with a grant of $1 million from the Micky and Vinita Charitable Fund. In the memory of his late mother Gaura Pant also known as Shivani, Muktesh (Micky) Pant (BT/CH/76) is setting up the Shivani Centre. In the year 1982, she was awarded Padma Shri by the Government of India for her contribution to Hindi literature.
Micky Pant, founder, Micky and Vinita Charitable Fund, said that having knowledge of various languages is always good, but fluency in English should not be a factor in getting a top education in engineering. He said that now the Shivani Centre will lead the way to nurture Hindi and other Indian languages and prepare for a future where digital technology will allow students to excel in engineering irrespective of their fluency in English.
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It should be noted that the Shivani Centre will enable the dissemination of technological tools to increase the ease of use for Hindi and other Indian Languages (OILs) on digital platforms, socio-emotional integration of students from Hindi and other Indian Language backgrounds at IIT Kanpur, which will also promote communication, literary and artistic expression using Hindi and OILs.
Talking about the establishment of the center, the director of IIT Kanpur, Abhay Karandikar, said that the Indian languages are important for educational and cultural development as they strengthen equity in education. Students with an Indian language background face challenges in navigating the English language based course content and as a result, they face academic and social exclusion.
Now, the Shivani Centre will ensure seamless integration of students of Hindi and OILs background at the institute and will fulfil the objectives laid out in National Education Policy (NEP) 2020, he added.
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