Jammu: The Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi (ABVP) workers and students on Tuesday staged a protest in Jammu, blocking the Tawi bridge, demands the inclusion of Dogri and other regional languages in the list of governments in the Union Territory of Jammu and Kashmir.
The protesters raised concerns over the exclusion of these languages from the list of government job posts said these languages are the regions identity.
Notably, in the recent announcemnt of nseveral jobs in j&k only Urdu, Persian, and a few other languages were considered, leaving out Dogri, a key language spoken by a significant portion of the Jammu region’s population.
“The lecturer posts that have come out, in that, there is no post for Hindi and Sanskrit. First month, we made a memorandum and spoke to them but to no avail, our demands were not fulfilled so we had to come out on the streets. Dogri is being ignored. They have preferred the languages that are common in Kashmir but in the languages in Jammu, like Hindi, Dogri and Sanskrit, there is not a single post,” one of the protesting students said.
The protesters were holding banners on which slogans like, “Videshi ka virodh, Swadeshi ka samman” (Opposition to foreign, respect for Indigenous) were written.
Earlier on Monday, a delegation of the ABVP submitted a memorandum to the Chairman of the University Grants Commission (UGC), Prof M Jagadesh Kumar, highlighting key issues related to higher education and students, including demands for an increase in ‘Fellowship’ and centralization of Common University Entrance Test (CUET), according to an official press release.
The memorandum focused on crucial matters such as scholarships, fellowships, entrance examinations, commercialization of education, student union elections, and administrative reforms in universities.
The ABVP urged the UGC to implement the Common University Entrance Test (CUET) as a centralized admission process across all universities, ensuring uniform application fees.
It also called for the regularization of the academic calendars for undergraduate, postgraduate, and PhD programs and controlling the rising application fees for admission tests.
Highlighting concerns over commercialization, corruption, and monopolization in private universities, ABVP demanded the introduction of central legislation to curb these practices.
The protesters also appealed for a halt to the annual hikes in tuition fees by central universities and the rollback of the financial autonomy granted under the guise of “graded autonomy.”