Urdu-Medium Schools Worry Over CBSE Order to Write Board Exams in English and Hindi only
Basant Kumar Mohanty | 18 September 2024 | The Telegraph
A decision by the Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE), the country's largest school board, to disallow students from writing board exams in any language other than Hindi and English has left three Urdu-medium schools of the Maulana Azad National Urdu University (MANUU) in a fix.
The MANUU "model schools" in Hyderabad, Nuh (Haryana) and Darbhanga (Bihar) offer education in Urdu. The schools are affiliated to the CBSE, which does not officially recognise any medium in terms of language, rather requiring students to pick a language of their choice while filling up their admission forms.
The governing body of the CBSE in June decided that answer papers written in any language other than Hindi and English without the board's permission would not be evaluated. Only Delhi-based schools will be allowed to exercise the option of seeking this permission.
The board had this year taken note of students under its Vijayawada region writing answers in Urdu without receiving any go-ahead from the CBSE. These students are not from MANUU schools.
"The concerned school may be instructed by the regional office that the answer books of students who write answers in medium other than Hindi or English without approval of the board shall not be evaluated. In spite of these instructions, if any student voluntarily writes answers in medium other than Hindi or English against Board's policy, his/her result will be declared without awarding any marks in that subject," the minutes of the GB meeting said.
MANUU started the three model schools in 2010. Officials from two of these schools said that the CBSE had granted them affiliation with full knowledge that their medium of learning was Urdu. They said the students of the MANUU schools had been getting question papers in English, Hindi and Urdu till 2020. From 2021, the board stopped providing question papers in Urdu.