B.S. Ramesh and

Nagesh Prabhu

BANGALORE: Even as more than 80 primary schools moved the Karnataka High Court against any move to derecognise them, the Government appears to be firm in its resolve to close down the institutions that have violated the undertaking they have given on the medium of instruction.

Sources in the office of the Advocate-General's, Karnataka High Court, told The Hindu here on Wednesday that notices had been issued to 2,215 schools asking why action should not be taken against them for violating the State's policy on the medium of instruction.

Similar notices would be sent to 200 more institutions in the next few days. The Government had taken a policy decision to shift students from such schools and the modalities were being worked out, they said.

The sources said there were more than 3 lakh students in the 2,215 institutions that had violated the norms. There were more than 11,000 teachers in these institutions, they said.

Notices to schools violating the norms on the medium of instruction were issued by the respective Deputy Directors of Public Instruction (DDPI). Although all these schools had been permitted to impart education to students from the first to the fifth standard only in Kannada, it was found that they were teaching in English, they said.

Last year too, several schools had approached the High Court challenging the action taken against them. The State had then given an undertaking that it would not initiate any action till this academic year.

This year, the State came up with a voluntary scheme to ensure that schools found still violating the rule could pay fine. However, even this scheme has been challenged in the court.

Officials in the Department of Education said that the schools would be permitted to pay the fine under the scheme till May 15. The forms for the scheme were available with the local Block Education Officer (BEO) and the schools had been asked to collect them from the jurisdictional BEOs. They said the scheme had been introduced to minimise hardship to students and teachers of the institutions facing action.

Defending the State's policy, the sources said that in States such as Maharashtra, Marathi was the medium of instruction and that this had been upheld by the Supreme Court.

SC observation

The Supreme Court, they said, had held that "a proper understating of Marathi language is necessary for easily carrying out the day-to-day affairs of the people living in the State and, hence, the regulation imposed by the State upon the linguistic minorities to teach its regional language is only a reasonable one."

It was on April 29, 1994, that the State evolved a language policy after the V.K. Gokak Committee submitted a report seeking to prescribe Kannada as the sole first language and medium of instruction in schools, sources said.

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