s. Rajen says there seems to be a general tendency among some communities in the state to not learn the script and language.
Manipur Education Minister S. Rajen on Tuesday revealed that the Center has released ₹18 crore as the first installment for “promotion of the state language Manipuri and Manipuri script”. There seems to be a general tendency among some communities of the state to not learn the script and language, he said. He felt that this psychological barrier could be overcome if the name of the script was changed to Manipuri script instead of Meitei, which the majority community in the state identified as Meitei.
It is the state language and the script is used in the royal history of Manipur over 2,000 years old. Also, this script is used at the college level. Soon after the advent of Vaishnavism in Manipur in the early 18th century, all invaluable scriptures were burnt and the script was replaced with Bengali. However, the Manipuri language has no use for many Bengali letters and the people here cannot pronounce some of them properly. In the last few decades, the Bengali script was replaced by this age-old script. However, only local newspapers continue to publish in the Bengali script. Recently there was an agreement between the press and script workers to switch to Manipuri.
Shri Rajen urged the people to use this old script. He also assured that the government is taking steps to include dialects of different communities in the school curriculum.
He further said that for some time government schools faced problems as most of the parents sent their children to private and missionary schools. However, government schools did succeed in restoring “trust” among the people, resulting in an increase in admissions to government schools.
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