shri vinod sharma - Rajya Sabha

word because "vernacular" means the language of the slaves. However, there is a
subtle distinction. In ancient Rome, a vernacular slave was a khandhani slave, a
slave whose parent had been bought by a family, who had been groomed, who was
bilingual, who spoke the language of the masters and the language of the slaves
and thereby became a kind of a bridge between the haves and the have-nots. To
that extent, I think, the term "vernacular" is not entirely inappropriate for Indian
languages.
For some time I have been very concerned about the Hindi print media. As
has been pointed out, our problems today are not the problems of scarcity, but the
problems of plenty. All of a sudden, the entire horizon has opened up before the
Indian language newspapers because the readership for English newspapers is
diversifying pretty fast through the Internet, and this has happened abroad and it is
now beginning to happen in India. But the readership for Indian languages is
growing because that is where our literacy campaigns and all the efforts being put
to educate people are taking root. So, millions of new literates are coming up in
every State in India. Hindi has, as you know, the largest footprint. It covers no
less than eleven States. Literacy levels in the southern States may be higher, but
in sheer demographic terms the readership of Hindi is enormous. Given the
demographic facts, the number of Parliamentarians that the Hindi belt sends is,
perhaps, the largest. That is why one needs to monitor, with special concern and
also with interest, what is happening in the Hindi media because, on the one hand,
it is giving news about the parliamentary happenings to the largest number of
readers and viewers if it is television channel, and, on the other, it is also
connecting up, in their own language, to a large number of our Parliamentarians
who wish to go on record in Hindi so that they can reach out to their electorate
very quickly. Therefore, the role of Hindi media in particular now bears a very close
analysis. All the good and the bad points about the Hindi belt's psyche get