The option will act as an additional tool for students as technical terms won't be changed in the Odia books though its meaning will be provided. It will now be easier for them to grasp the engineering concepts with the option of regional language available to them," Binod Das, chairman & honorary secretary, Odisha Private Engineering College Association, said. "Around 60% children studying in rural areas have a language problem even though they are good at studies. The NEP calls for imparting education in the mother tongue as far as possible and has a provision for engineering colleges to offer B Tech programmes in 11 regional languages - Hindi, Marathi, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Gujarati, Malayalam, Bengali, Assamese, Punjabi and Odia. For the latter, the recent announcement by Union education minister Dharmendra Pradhan that engineering will also be taught in Odia from the 2022-23 academic session is no less than the rectification of a blunder in pedagogy, which the Centre's much-touted National Education Policy (NEP) aims to correct. Still others would take the extra burden of enrolling for English-speaking classes. Many among them would resort to rote learning and simply regurgitate it all in the exam answer scripts. But for those from vernacular-medium schools, studying in a language they were not conversant with was a struggle.
BHUBANESWAR: For decades, the convent-educated have had an edge over others in higher education, especially in engineering colleges, owing to their good command over the English language.