Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) is in the process of setting up a school of Indian studies and a school of Indian languages, the university’s vice-chancellor Santhishree Dhulipudi Pandit said at The Indian Express’s Idea Exchange session last week.
Speaking about the school for Indian languages, Pandit added, “This is by corpus funding by every state. So, the central government doesn’t give us any money. Every state government institutes its chair professor and makes the selection. That professor works at JNU. Their salary and everything is looked after from the corpus grant.”
Till now, states have come forward with grants for Tamil, Kannada, Odiya and Urdu. Additionally, the university will be creating a centre for translation interpretation alongside Indian language labs, she said.Pandit said she was “hopeful” to establish a ‘Sardar Vallabhai Patel Centre for Partition Studies’ at the university.
“Dhaka University has a genocide studies centre. We want to work with neighbours as well as other parts of the world, of how they looked at Holocaust, how they look at partitions. Instead of just having exhibitions and talks, I think real research and other things would be very useful as a database. We are suggesting this, we don’t know whether we will get it from the government and the UGC,” she said.
She added: “We are looking at putting some of our courses online, especially M.A. in Political Science, M.A. in Public Administration, in Business Economics. There is a great demand for the introduction of Korean as an online course. We hope to make money there. Many of the Taiwanese and Korean industries are coming to India. So, if they recruit plumbers, mechanics, they want them to know languages – Korean, Taiwanese Mandarin. So for that certificate course, they are ready to give money to JNU and we are expected to run it as a certificate course, where even Ph.D. students and others can teach.”
Courtesy : The Indian Express
