Assamese should be mandatory in APSC, demands AASU

Guwahati: After the Assam Cabinet announced that Assam or the language paper will no longer be mandatory for the aspirants of the Assam Civil Service or the APSC as a whole, the Assam Assam Students' Union (AASU) has demanded the immediate withdrawal of the decision.

Speaking about the issue, Sankar Jyoti Baruah, General Secretary of the AASU said that the decision taken by the cabinet is very "unfortunate" for the people of Assam. "We do not understand how can one decide to remove Assamese from the list of compulsory papers", he added.

He added that by removing the Assamese language as compulsory the safeguard or rights of people who love Assamese or have completed their education in Assamese medium has been put at risk. "As the language has now been removed, people who are not from Assam and cannot speak any local language can be qualified by just knowing Hindi. This can never be accepted", he added.

He further added that Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma said that if anyone wants to get employed in Assam, then he or she should know Assamese but the latest announced now seems to be a clear "U-turn".

He added, "We demand the immediate removal of the Cabinet Decision."

The Assam Cabinet on Wednesday announced that language paper will not be mandatory from now onwards for the Assam Civil Service aspirants but with three conditions.

Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma said, "We have noticed that aspirants from the different medium of schools have issues with the language paper. We see that often the aspirants find difficulty in cracking the exams for this reason."

He added that to solve this problem, the Cabinet has decided that Assam or language paper will not be compulsory but with three conditions will be put forward for this.

The Chief Minister added that the first condition will be that the candidate or the aspirant should be a resident of Assam and the second will be that the particular candidate should be registered at the Employment Exchange of Assam.

The condition was that the candidate should be fluent in spoken Assamese or any other allied language spoken in Assam. He added that Hindi is also among one language that can be considered as allied.