Maharashtra's minister for education and Marathi language Vinod Tawde must be a happier man now. His pet project of promoting Marathi in schools might have been withdrawn by the government due to staunch opposition from various stakeholders, but Mumbai University has taken up this cause seriously.

Promotion of Marathi language in higher education is among the prime focus area highlighted in the perspective plan of the varsity for the year "2016-17 and beyond". For, it believes that medium of instruction in mother tongue or local language brings quality higher education.

"One of the established consensual learning of experts working in the arena of higher education is that one of the powerful issues when it comes to quality in higher education happens to be the medium of instruction whether it is in the local language or mother tongue. Whilst this is recognised, no real efforts appear to be taken anywhere to make quality material available in local languages. Our University intends to take concrete steps in this direction," reads the perspective plan uploaded on the varsity website last week.

Besides, strengthening its efforts in teaching of Marathi, University also plans to "generate" and translate "top quality teaching material" of various subjects, which are mostly available in English, in the state's language, highlights the perspective plan.

Moreover, university will encourage more students to learn Marathi in its endeavor to "transform Marathi as full-fledged language of modern knowledge" by creating a corpus for it. Varsity also expressed its commitment in developing Marathi language software to connect with other institutes in the state alongside with the Centre's National Mission on Education through Information and Communication Technology.

"We will make every effort to invest (and seek state's help in terms of resources) and develop local language software so as to make the connectivity efforts operationally functional."Interestingly, instead of Marathi language department, University has named German Department's initiative to promote the Marathi language using European language tools as varsity's "ongoing efforts" for the mother tongue cause.

In the absence of the senate and other academic and management bodies, the plan has been directly approved by the state Higher Education Council which the Narendra Jadhav committee had described as a perennially "defunct body" in its report submitted to the state government in October this year.

The state government has dissolved all bodies in the public Universities in Maharashtra in July giving sweeping powers to Vice Chancellors till at least August 2016 as the new Public Universities Act is in the making.

University results for undergraduate and post graduate courses in almost all streams continue to remain dismal-in most programs it is below 50%. Professors often cite language as major reason behind poor show. "Most students come from vernacular medium schools and hence struggle in the University education which is mainly imparted in English. Even books are in English only," said a professor.

Ironically, University's own Marathi language department is one of the most neglected one with only handful of students enrolling for the subject since past many years at post graduate and research level.