With Kannada now compulsory for engineering students, are there enough teachers available?

Are there enough Kannada language teachers to teach students in engineering colleges affiliated to Visvesvaraya Technological University? To this, Dr Karisiddappa, Vice-Chancellor, VTU, said, "As of now there are no Kannada teachers but we do have English language teachers. After the implementation of NEP, these colleges affiliated to VTU can appoint adjunct faculty (on contractual basis) or the colleges can ask the language teachers working under the same educational trust or educational society to teach engineering students as well."

With the National Education Policy to be implemented in Karnataka for undergraduate students from this academic year, Kannada has been made compulsory with all the STEM courses. According to the newly designed draft model curriculum by Visvesvaraya Technological University (VTU), Kannada is compulsory for engineering students to study in their third semester. While students from Karnataka will study Traditional Kannada that will include novels, stories and poetry, students from other states will study Balake Kannada which is functional Kannada. They will learn simple vocabulary and basic Kannada that is required for them to communicate casually.

If there is no particular faculty in place to teach Kannada, then how can students be able to score 50 marks in the internal exams and 50 in the end semester exams? Similarly, students will earn one credit point for Kannada during their engineering graduation. Earlier, according to the engineering students, Kannada courses existed for students studying engineering courses but it was only for 30 marks. Though these marks weren't considered in the marks card, passing this language exam was mandatory before the implementation of NEP. In fact, the Government of Karnataka made it compulsory for CBSE, ICSE students from the last academic year.

Meanwhile, when we asked Pradeep P, Commissioner for Collegiate Education about the lack of teachers for Kannada, he said, "There are faculty members to teach Kannada at least in the government degree colleges. That is why we have included and made it compulsory under NEP. In fact, for other graduate students, Kannada will be there for four semesters with three credits per semester. As per our statistics, 99 per cent of the students choose the language during their UG, for which teachers are already there to teach them. Only 0.2 or 0.5 per cent choose to study other languages. English is mandatory for all, hence they study for whichever semesters they have it."