School Education department under Rajasthan Government is working on a proposal to implement Sanskrit as the compulsory third-language in all the schools across the state. If this move gets implemented, students of class 4th to 10th, studying in state board colleges across the state, will have to compulsorily study Sanskrit as their third languages. Earlier, the students had an option to choose among Gujarati, Bengali, Urdu, Punjabi, Hindi, and Sindhi.
Speaking on the development, Vasudev Devnani, minister for primary and school education in the Rajasthan Government said that the department is working on exploring options to make the language compulsory in the schools. According to him, this step will help the students know better about their rich history and the culture. He also added that the department is considering all the suggestions to create an ecosystem to make Sanskrit more job oriented. State Education Department will send a detailed proposal to the chief minister Vasundhara Raje and union HRD minister Prakash Javdekar.
This decision will impact both, Government and Private Schools affiliated to Rajasthan state board. According to the publicly available data, this decision will affect 13,983 secondary and senior secondary government schools and 20,744 upper primary schools. It will apply to 16,239 upper primary and 14,227 senior secondary private schools.
The government of Rajasthan has recently announced 13,500 job vacancies for school teachers, out of those, 5000 are for Sanskrit teachers. In his statement, Devnani said that the government is working towards ensuring that none of the senior secondary schools are left without a full-time Sanskrit teachers.
While being asked, if the decision will also apply to the CBSE schools, Devnani said that the government is looking into the possibilities, however, nothing can be confirmed just yet.