Gandhinagar: Union Home Minister Amit Shah on Sunday said there was no conflict between Hindi and other Indian languages, and stressed that it should not just serve as a spoken tongue but must also become a language of science, technology, the judiciary, and police.
Addressing the inaugural session of the 5th Akhil Bharatiya Rajbhasha Sammelan, Shah said Indians must preserve their languages and make them “immortal”, urging parents to speak to children in their mother tongue.
“There is no conflict between Hindi and other Indian languages. Learned men like Dayanand Saraswati, Mahatma Gandhi, KM Munshi, Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, and many others accepted Hindi and promoted it. Gujarat, where Gujarati and Hindi have coexisted, is an excellent example of the development of both languages,” he said.
The Union minister said, “Hindi is not just a spoken language or a language of administration. Hindi should also be the language of science, technology, justice and police. When all these works are done in Indian languages, then the connection with the public is automatically established.”
Shah said that while Sanskrit has given us “the Ganga of knowledge, and Hindi has taken this knowledge to every home, and that knowledge has reached every person through our local languages.”
He said parents must always speak to children in their mother tongues.
“This is very important for the child’s future, as many psychologists and educationists have confirmed that a child thinks in his mother tongue. … As soon as you impose a language other than the mother tongue on a child, 25 to 30 per cent of his mind’s capacity will be spent in translating it,” Shah said.
He further said that Prime Minister Narendra Modi has worked to strengthen local languages through various types of technology, and the Home Ministry has created Bhartiya Bhasha Anubhag (Indian languages department), which will promote Hindi and other languages.
“For this, we are using science and technology a lot,” he said.
Shah said that Hindi has a place in education in Gujarat, a development which was made possible due to leaders like Mahatma Gandhi, Dayanand Saraswati, etc., who urged people to communicate with each other and promote Hindi in every state.
“As a result of this, a child from Gujarat can go anywhere in the country, do business and get acceptance,” he said.
He pointed out that Bahubhashi Anuvad Sarthi is being used for translations powered by advanced technology.
“By training this software, we will keep enriching it further, and in the coming days, the citizens of a country will be able to communicate in their own language through this,” he said.
He said that one cannot aspire for independence and self-respect if the language of communication is not one’s own.
The Hindi Shabd Sindhu, which started with 51,000 words, has now crossed 7 lakh words, and by 2029, it will become the largest dictionary among all languages in the world, Shah said.
“I assure you that by 2029, this Hindi Shabd Sindu will become the largest dictionary among all languages of the world. Through this dictionary, we have also made Hindi flexible. Many Hindi scholars insist that Hindi should be Sanskrit-rich. No one has any objection to this. But the empty space has to be filled with Indian languages. Only then will Hindi feel familiar to all the people of India. And Hindi can be made a spoken language only when it becomes flexible,” he said.
“We have to make many such changes with time. Those who do not change with time become history. I believe that our language is history, it is the present as well as the future. And that is why the use of the experiment with Shabd Sindhu is to make Hindi very useful, flexible and useful for the masses,” he said.
