The Southern Railway has asked its officers to take “maximum” efforts to use Hindi in their official work.
Launching a special drive from August 14 to September 15, to promote usage of Hindi, the Deputy General Manager (Official Language), Suresh Chandra, said the work done by officers during the period would be taken up for assessment and record purposes.
Directing the officers to check the implementation of Hindi during departmental inspections and include the progress made in their report, he said they could give dictations in Hindi and also make small noting like ‘sanctioned’, ‘agreed’, ‘approved’ in the official language.
A Southern Railway spokesperson said the circular was part of the routine instructions given to promote Hindi as an official language. Parrying questions on linking of the progress made in usage of Hindi by an officer to his/her assessment or appraisal, another senior railway officer said using Hindi as a medium of communication, including oral instructions, letter correspondence and inspection reports, was only an advisory to promote the language in tune with national policy and not mandatory on non-Hindi speaking States like Tamil Nadu.
The Government of India, in its annual programme (2025-26) for transacting the official work of the union in Hindi said the use of Hindi in government offices was progressively increasing but substantial business was still being done in English. The objective of the ‘Official Language’ policy was that normally Hindi be used in all government business to the maximum extent possible. This would be in keeping with the spirit of the Constitution. “Needless to say that doing official work in the peoples’ language will speed-up development and bring transparency in administration.”
Southern Railway covers the States of Tamil Nadu, Kerala, Puducherry and a small portion of Andhra Pradesh. All these States come under Region ‘C’ of the demarcation of States/Union Territories by the Union government done on the basis of prevalence of spoken and written Hindi language.
Published – August 15, 2025 01:32 am IST
