The All India Council for Technical Education launched a new scheme ‘AICTE-VAANI’ to promote Indian languages among faculty members and students for effective teaching learning process.
VAANI which stands for Vibrant Advocacy for Advancement and Nurturing of Indian Languages, is launched by AICTE Chairman Prof. T.G. Sitharam and Padma Shri Awardee and Chairman of the High Powered Committee for the Promotion of Indian Languages Shri Chamu Krishna Shastry at AICTE HQ, New Delhi.
The scheme will provide financial assistance to AICTE approved Institutions for conducting conferences/seminars/workshops of minimum 2 days to maximum 3 days in emerging fields of technical education in 12 regional languages. Under the scheme, a maximum of 100 conferences annually will financially be supported with Rs 2 lakh per conference. The 100 conferences will include eight conferences per regional language (Gujarati, Marathi, Telugu, Tamil, Punjabi, Bengali, Kannada, Assamese, Malayalam, Odia & Urdu) and twelve conferences in Hindi language. In total, an amount of Rs 2 crore will be reimbursed by AICTE annually under the scheme.
The 12 emerging fields covered under the scheme for organising conferences/seminars/workshops are ‘Advanced Materials, Rare earth & critical minerals, Semiconductor, Space and Defense, Blue Economy, Energy, Sustainability & Climate Change, Advanced Computing (Supercomputing, AI, Quantum Computing), Next Gen Communications, Smart Cities & Mobility, Aggrotech & Food processing, Health Care & Med-Tech, Disaster Management & Resilient Infrastructure and Manufacturing & Industry 4.0.
Launching the scheme, AICTE Chairman highlighted, “AICTE -VAANI scheme will help in creating knowledge base in local language and will encourage creation of a treasure of latest technical knowledge incorporating the newest developments in regional languages”. He further said, “This scheme will also promote promotion of the research papers in the regional languages and further enhance the collaboration between Institutions and Industry.”
Chammu K Shastry commented “The scheme will remove the dilemma regarding giving preference to only English language rather than vernacular languages. The importance of regional languages or mother tongue in education will ensure cultural diversity of the nation”
The applications for AICTE Approved Institutions are open till 10th April, 2024. The Institutions will be selected based on the parameters designed by AICTE available at https://www.aicte-india.org/. Once selected, AICTE will provide approval to Institutions for conducting the seminars/workshops/conferences.
