By Ganesh Bhatt

New Delhi, Dec 18 (IANS): A nationwide change will take place in the higher education system, especially in undergraduate courses as language will cease to be a barrier in BA, B.Com, and B.Sc courses.

Students will be able to graduate in their mother tongue.

In view of the same, preparations have begun to make the course books available in languages like Bengali, Gujarati, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Odia, Tamil and Telugu among others.

The University Grants Commission (UGC), under an initiative by the Union Ministry of Education, is engaging with publishers to translate English textbooks to various Indian languages.

Pearson India, Narosa Publishers, Viva Books, S. Chand Publishers, Vikas Publishing, New Age Publishers, Mahavir Publications, Universities Press and Taxmann Publications are some of the major publications involved in the process.

Along with these, representatives of Oxford University Press, Orient Blackswan and Elsevier also participated in the high-level meeting.

The UGC recently held discussions with representatives of Wiley India, Springer Nature, Taylor & Francis, Cambridge University Press India, Cengage India and McGraw Hill, India on bringing out undergraduate English textbooks in Indian languages.

UGC, as a part of NEP 2020, is working towards getting the most popular textbooks translated for UG programmes in higher education institutions across the country in the 12 Indian languages.

UGC Chairman Professor M. Jagadesh Kumar told IANS that the Commission will act as a nodal agency to provide help and support to the publishers with regard to identification of textbooks, translation tools and editing experts so that the books can be made affordable in the digital format.

He added that the Commission will proceed further in two ways, wherein popular textbooks of the programmes will be identified and translated and simultaneously, Indian authors will be encouraged to write the textbooks in Indian languages for non-technical subjects.

Kumar was all praise for the publishers who participated in the mission and said that the Commission intends to get several books translated within six to twelve months, for which it has constituted an apex committee to prepare a road map and work towards the goal.

Kumar said that the focus will be on the translation of existing textbooks which will later be extended to postgraduate programmes.