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Under the provisions of National Education Policy (NEP) 2020, the state government had made the Kannada language a compulsory subject for undergraduate students from the academic year 2021-22.
A PIL was filed before the Karnataka High court opposing the decision of the state government and the case was assigned to a division bench of Chief Justice Ritu Raj Awasthi and Justice Sachin Shankar Magadum.
During the hearing of the PIL, Advocate General Prabhuling K Navadagi raised the objection arguing that compulsory Kannada is not a regular course. Anybody who seeks employment in Karnataka must study Kannada and that they do not require to study Kannada in the classical sense, he argued.
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The hearing on the matter was adjourned to November 10, 2021.
Earlier, senior counsel SS Naganand, representing the petitioners, argued that students coming from outside the state are at a disadvantage as they haven’t studied the basics of the language. Making a language compulsory discriminates against them. The government’s order would affect more than 1.30 lakh students and 4,000 language teachers in the state, he said.