Over 11 lakh students of Uttar Pradesh Board who appeared for their class Xth and XIIth exams this year failed to clear the Hindi Paper. This depsite the fact that they live in the Hindi belt and their mother tongue is Hindi.
According to state secondary education department, “over 3.38 lakh students in intermediate have failed in Hindi while the number is twice as much in high school where 7.81 lakh students have not been able to clear the Hindi paper”.
This marks a 25% rise in number of failed students in Hindi as compared to last year which was nearly 7.5 lakh.
Curiously, students in intermediate who opted for regional languages including Assamese, Malayalam, Marathi, Nepali etc have recorded 100 per cent success rate.
The poor performance of the students could be attributed to their lack of focus on Hindi.
“Majority of the student tend to ignore Hindi as a subject. Even their parents ask the children to focus on subjects like mathematics, physics, chemistry and take Hindi for granted”, Asian Age quoted a senior teacher as saying.
Surprisingly, more students in terms of percentage passed English exam than Hindi. While 80.8% students cleared English exam, 91.1% passed in Urdu, only 79.2% passed the Hindi paper. Students fared ever worse in Sanskrit and just 63.3% could pass the exam.
Speaking to Times of India, Director of Agra University’s KM Institute of Hindi Studies and Linguistics, Professor Pardeep Shridha said: “Students struggling with Hindi is a new trend catching up. Students are lacking basic reading and writing skills in their mother tongue which is a regretful situation. The problem of lack of required focus on Hindi starts right from the primary education level. Secondary education system weighs core subjects and Hindi is ignored. The state government must take cognizance of so many students failing in the state language and develop a plan for improvement.”
