An order by the Central Board of Secondary Education, to not allow students from writing board exams in any language other than English and Hindi has left students of three Urdu-medium schools in uncertainty, according to a report by The Telegraph.
The schools operate under the aegis of the Maulana Azad National Urdu University in Hyderabad, Haryana’s Nuh and Bihar’s Darbhanga districts. The Central Board of Secondary Education’s governing body had said in June that board examinations written in any language other than English and Hindi would not be evaluated.
Only schools in Delhi have been given the option of seeking prior permission from the board to let students write the examinations in Urdu or any other language.
For the past three years, students at the three Urdu-medium schools have been provided with question papers in English or Hindi. However, they answered the questions in Urdu. This will no longer be allowed by the central board.
An unidentified official of the Maulana Azad National Urdu University told The Telegraph that they had not received prior notice from the board before the decision was taken to stop the Urdu language question papers. “Our students are facing difficulty in understanding the questions since they are not in Urdu…The board has not resolved the problem yet,” the person said.
Afroz Alam, a professor of political science at the Urdu-language university, was quoted as saying that the board’s move was against the spirit of the National Education Policy, which encourages that students be taught in their mother tongue.
“Once the students start learning in Urdu, they should be allowed to appear for examinations in that medium,” he said. “It would be unfair to ask them to write in English or Hindi.”
The Telegraph reported that Sanyam Bhardwaj, the board’s controller of examinations, refused to acknowledge the schools as Urdu-medium schools. “There are Urdu-medium schools only in Delhi and according to their requirements, question papers are provided in Urdu,” Bhardwaj was quoted as saying by the newspaper.