Comments
Faced with criticism over its President’s recent exhortation to members to adopt Hindi in their work, the CA Institute has retracted.
The Institute of Chartered Accountants of India (ICAI) on Monday rushed to clarify that it is not mandatory to use Hindi for work or for stakeholders’ interactions.
On a back foot
“There is no compulsion (in using Hindi). It is a choice. There is no restriction and one can write in their own preferred language. I had only encouraged members (to adopt Hindi),” Nihar Jambusaria, President, ICAI, told BusinessLine .
This position will also be clarified at the upcoming monthly newsletter (for the next month).
Institute’s latest stance is in the wake of outrage over ICAI President Nihar Jambusaria’s message in the recent monthly newsletter where he asked members to adopt Hindi in their work and promote the national language in their work and interactions with other stakeholders. But a number of non-Hindi speaking members took issue with the President’s message. There was a lot of criticism, especially from Tamil Nadu.
“Realising the power of our mother tongue Hindi, ICAI is trying to incorporate more use of Hindi into its work culture,” Jambusaria had said in the newsletter.
Under the subtitle ‘promoting Hindi language’ in the newsletter, Jambusaria noted that September 14 being marked as Hindi Diwas and said that he believes that there should not be a specific day for Hindi, “rather, Hindi should be part of our life”.
Critics were quick to point out that the ICAI President’s exhortation to promote Hindi and adopt this language in the work of CA members was not in tune with the ethos of linguistic pluralism of India and hurt the sentiments of the people of non-Hindi speaking States.
It was pointed out that only 12 out of 35 States and Union Territories in the country had chosen Hindi as the first Choice of communication while among rest only few chose Hindi as their second or third language of communication. A majority of them chose English according to the results of 2011 language census released in 2018.
Comments
COMMENT NOW
Comments
Comments have to be in English, and in full sentences. They cannot be abusive or personal. Please abide by our community guidelines for posting your comments.
We have migrated to a new commenting platform. If you are already a registered user of TheHindu Businessline and logged in, you may continue to engage with our articles. If you do not have an account please register and login to post comments. Users can access their older comments by logging into their accounts on Vuukle.