Telugu Must In All Telangana Schools From 2018-19

Telangana Chief Minister K Chandrashekar Rao has instructed the officials concerned to initiate measures for making Telugu a compulsory subject in all the private and government schools in the state from the 2018-19 academic year.

The CM said that to implement this policy, an act would be passed in the current legislature session.

The CM was speaking after a meeting at Pragati Bhavan with a team of officials who were back from visiting Tamil Nadu to study the implementation of Tamil in the educational institutions there. After hearing their views, the CM spoke about the guidelines to be framed to teach Telugu as a subject in all the schools in the state.

"We have decided that Telugu will be taught as one of the compulsory subjects in all the private and government schools to save the language and protect our culture. It has become a necessity for everyone these days to study in the English medium due to the changing circumstances. The children's future should not be affected, and at the same time Telugu should also not be neglected. This is the reason we are saying that even children studying in the English medium should study Telugu as a subject," he said.

"Initially we thought that Telugu should be made compulsory even in Intermediate. But the Intermediate course is not the same in all the institutions, and it is difficult to introduce Telugu as a compulsory subject at that stage. Hence, and after studying the mother tongue policy being implementated in Tamil Nadu and Punjab, we have decided to make Telugu a compulsory subject till tenth standard only for the present," the CM said.

The CM asked the Telugu Sahitya Academy and the Telugu University to prepare class-wise syllabus for Telugu. He also instructed the officials of the education department to ensure that at least one Telugu pandit was appointed in all the private schools.