Bhojpuri and Rajasthani to be included in 8th schedule

New Delhi, Dec 18 (UNI) Minister of State for Home Sriprakash Jaiswal today informed the Lok Sabha that the Centre is considering the inclusion of Bhojpuri and Rajasthani languages under the 8th schedule of the Constitution.

The matter was raised in the House through a calling attention nation by Prabhunath Singh (JD-U) who said it was strange that a language which is spoken by over 18 crore people in the country has failed to be included in the 8th schedule while some of the minor languages were included.

He said nearly two years ago, Home Minister Shivraj Patil in response to a similar calling attention had assured the House that Bhojpuri and Rajasthani languages would soon be included in the list of 8th schedule languages. ''But so far, nothing has been done in that direction,'' he added.

Mr Jaiswal in his reply said until now, 22 languages were included in the 8th schedule -- Assamese, Bengali, Bodo, Dogri, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Kashmiri, Konkani, Maithili, Malayalam, Manipuri, Marathi, Nepali, Oriya, Punjabi, Sanskriti, Santhali, Sindhi, Tamil, Telugu and Urdu.

He said as there were no parameters laid down for inclusion of more languages in the Eighth Schedule to the Constitution, a high powered body under the Chairmanship of the then Secretary (Official language) was set up by this Ministry in October 1996 for evolving a set of objective criteria for inclusion of more languages in the Eighth schedule.

He said the committee submitted its report in April 1998 and recommended a five point criteria for inclusion of more languages in the 8th schedule. According to the report, one official language of a State may be included in the 8th schedule, it should be spoken by a substantial proportion of the population of a particular State, it should be an independent language and not a dialect/derivative of a language included in the 8th schedule, recognition by Sahitya Akademi and it should have a well defined literature of a fairly advanced level of development.

Accordingly, action has been initiated to consider inclusion of Bhojpuri and Rajasthani language in the Eighth Schedule, Mr Jaiswal said.

He said the Government was keen to get the Bill passed during the budget session in February.

Shailendra Kumar (SP), Alok Kumar Mehta (RJD), Prof Rasa Singh Rawat (BJP) and Sitaram Singh (RJD) associated themselves with this issue.

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