A Novel Programme with a Vision

            The Central Institute of Indian Languages was established by the Government of India in 1969 and is presently under the Ministry of Human Resource Development, Department of Higher Education. In the last 39 years of its existence, it has grown as a premier Institute concerned with the use and development of all Indian languages. It is recognized within the country as well as abroad for the quality of its wide-ranging linguistic research and language studies. The Institute offers you a novel programme with a vision to harness your talents and mould your career in language development.  Choose this programme and you could change your life.

            Language Education plays a critical role in mental development and knowledge production.  Learning different language broadens our mental horizon, develops our cognitive abilities and widens our understanding. It enhances our communicative competence, supports multilingualism and contributes to development of languages and cultural life.  The Central Institute of Indian Languages offers you ample opportunities for learning a second language, opportunities which could make a difference. By choosing to learn another Indian language, you can make a positive contribution to national integration and with informed views on language studies through this training programme you can promote quality in language pedagogy and nurture tolerance for diversity.  This programme provides opportunities to become better researchers in social science, besides becoming more creative teachers.  You also get personality and career development opportunities.

The programme will bring together people who would like to make a career as specialists in language education and language related research.  These people will have diverse backgrounds: teachers, linguists, researchers, tribal and minority language speakers and other graduates who have a demonstrable interest in language.  Your participation could make a difference in your life, in the lives of generations of your students and in the growth of our languages and culture.

From the Desk of the Director

            Academic organizations are a very unique kind of social institutions – they are a curious combination of entities with a singular focus as well as with plural perspectives.  An institution of this kind is often found to be an abode of advanced learning with a particular focus, and at the same time, as confluence of many ideas, beliefs and theories.  As a national institution of advanced research, CIIL combines in itself traits of both these types.  As a truly multi-faceted organ of the Department of Higher Education, Ministry of Human Resource Development, Government of India, the CIIL

• Assimilates and distributes the fruits of its own research as well as R&D initiatives of other institutions in collaboration with this institute to all peer researchers and institutions,
• Provides ready manpower or readies manpower to provide support to such efforts in research and development in the universities and institutions who take up projects of national importance in the area of Indian languages and linguistics, and
• Encourages discussion on all varieties of thoughts, theories and practices in language sciences – often seemingly contradictory- but each one having its own heritage and importance.

            I strongly believe that academic institutions must be deeply embedded in their societies.  Although universities were established in the medieval period to provide knowledge and training in only a few major professions, by the 19th century they became creators of new knowledge and began indulging in basic research.  In the modern-day societies, academic bodies have become the most important social institutions in the complex process of knowledge creation and distribution, and therefore, they stand at the centre of our societies.  These institutions have also taken on a political function in society in that they often serve as centres of socio-political thought, and train those who eventually become members of the social, political and literary elite.

            The political economy of Higher Education shows that an important priority in the recent period has been to modernize and refresh our systems, which, unfortunately led to focus on only or mainly urban areas, leading to a quick rise of a large middle class constituency and its strong desire to see avenues of upward mobility expanded.  In the process, a large number of people get left out with no access to educational opportunities. As the new urban middle class grew in power, they increasingly threw their weight behind educational reform, so that basic and secondary education has had, over the last few decades, a steady growth for the classes that could afford it.  And, as their numbers grew, the supply of students who were capable of, and interested in, getting a higher education also grew.  Ultimately this growing demand put pressure on all governments to expand all institutions of advanced education.  But there has been a very little realization that these institutions owe their rise to the common man and that it is, therefore, necessary to contribute to their welfare in as many ways as possible.  The special efforts that CIIL has made in protecting, promoting and documenting our little known linguistic heritage by archiving 118 Indian languages, including 80 tribal languages, has been a step in that direction.  CIIL’s new initiatives in surveying India’s linguistic space as well as working for the minor and endangered languages will help alter this picture substantially. We believe that harnessing of higher education to the broader needs of national socio-cultural and economic development should be the focus of the present times.

            The dynamics of change over the decade created a bewildering variety and combination of academic institutions.  Differences in size and quality, ranging from large institutions with satisfactory levels of quality to very small entities with questionable standards, and any numbers of combinations between these extremes, are evident.  In the past, the discourse on educational policy placed coverage and quality as alternatives to each other.  But in the new environments, I think it is imperative that both these objectives be reaffirmed.  Otherwise, we risk abandoning educational standards in favour of meeting merely the needs of the market.  There is no doubt that, having set high standards, CIIL stands out in the middle of these institutions.  We, at CIIL would therefore like to see that the institutions that deal with sensitive subjects like ‘Language and Society’ should reaffirm their social commitments and contribute to our national development planning activity by emphasizing on a seven-pronged strategy in the coming years:

• Literacy level among women in India being alarmingly low, it will be necessary to expand our school education system so as to introduce and include as many languages as possible, so that the girl children are educated in their own languages.  For this purpose, institutions and universities specializing in the study of Indian languages should take lead in studying and preparing materials in as many minority and tribal languages as possible.
• It should be a special endeavor of CIIL to promote and document the endangered languages of India, which are very much a part of India’s plural cultural heritage.
• Special drives will be undertaken to promote translation, literary, and other creative activities in minority languages of India.
• A special effort will be made by the CIIL to implement the Constitutional provision to enrich Hindi, as the official language as well as a language of national importance, by relating Hindi with other major modern Indian languages and by drawing from the lexical resources of these languages.
• Indian languages will be related to the advancements being made in the area of Information Technology.  Language Technology will be given the required push to create specialized software in Indian languages, on-line courses in Language Teaching, and development of Translation tools, etc.
• It will be our effort to make the new generation aware of our rich literary and linguistic heritage through translation of contemporary and classical texts, and by creating a Manuscriptorium of the Contemporary writing in Indian languages.
• The traditional knowledge bases and learning systems available in our Sanskritic, Dravidian, and Perso-Arabic traditions will be researched into and promoted to make them useful for application in modern-day society.
• In order to take up all the above activities, we need to move towards a high quality linguistic and cultural documentation of our languages and speech communities, and the training courses imparted by the institute and its branches should move towards readying the manpower to do so.

To the extent that our new entrants and trainees take up training at our RLCs in the above spirit, I wish them all a very happy learning year!                                                          

                       
                                                                                                Udaya Narayana Singh
                                                                                                            DIRECTOR