Rajasthan Education Department may soon make Sanskrit compulsory in schools as a third language. This will be applied to state board schools for 4th to 10th Standard students so that they can be provided access to “ancient wisdom regarding Bharat Varsha”. Reportedly, the decision will be implemented in both government and private schools.
As of now, students have a choice for the third language from options like Sanskrit, Punjabi, Gujarati, Sindhi, Urdu, and Bengali. Although the decision is not confirmed yet, the department is aiming to test the feasibility of the idea. Efforts are being aimed at developing a new curriculum within which the language can be made more “job oriented”.
In the government-operated units, 13,983 secondary and senior secondary schools alongside 20,744 upper primary schools will be affected by the decision. As for the private units, 16,239 primary, as well as 14,277 senior secondary schools, will be included in the implementation.
Recently, the education department had also declared about 13,500 teaching positions among which 5,000 vacancies have been filled by Sanskrit teachers. As per the state education minister Vasudev Devnani, that the plan is to employ at least one Sanskrit teacher at every senior secondary school so that Sanskrit scholars can be created.
Well, it won’t be wrong to say that Sanskrit is quite valuable for India but with time its importance is fading away. This initiative is a positive development towards bringing a much-needed change in the education system.
Touted as the oldest language of the world, its technicalities are minimal and in fact, it is the easiest to understand. There are not many punctuation marks, the phonetics is simple, and the sentences are well structured in Sanskrit. Considering these factors, making Sanskrit compulsory for students at the most crucial stages of their academic journey is a wonderful idea.
