No end in sight for plight of Kannadigas in Kasargod

As most government orders and communications come in Malayalam, linguistic minorities have to depend on translators

With yet another election campaign at its peak, the linguistic minorities of Kasargod that comes to around three lakh lament that their basic woes are getting least attention of the mainstream political parties.

The linguistic minorities that mainly comprise of Kannadigas lament that with the Kerala government giving more stress to Malayalam, they are facing difficulties at government offices. As most government orders and communications come in Malayalam, they have to depend on translators. Officials who do not know Kannada are being posted at the 20 odd panchayats in the Kannadigas dominated parts of Kasargod that shares borders with Karnataka.

Rathnakara Mallamoole of the Karnataka Samithi in Kasargod told DH that the mainstream political parties were least concerned about the basic issues of the Kannadigas.

Now the BJP representatives have held a talk with the representatives of Kannadigas to understand their problems, while the other parties were not even doing that. But any serious interventions to address the woes were still awaited, he said.

A commission of Kerala former chief secretary P Prabhakaran in 2012 had listed out the problems faced by the linguistic minorities. As per the report, most of the government officers working in the linguistic minority area are not conversant with Kannada and hence the common public who know only Kannada or Tulu face difficulty in interacting with them.

All the official correspondences and application forms are in Malayalam and hence Kannada speaking people are at the mercy of the translators. There are instances wherein people are constrained to sign in the First Information Reports which are written in Malayalam, which they sign even when they are unable to understand the contents. The enactments, rules, government orders, circulars and correspondences are all in Malayalam.

The commission report also pointed out that there were government orders which require that in linguistic minority areas, the Malayalam texts of important government instructions be mandatorily translated to Kannada, but are seldom being followed. The number of Kannada-knowing officers working in the village offices and other front-line public service delivery institutions is very inadequate.

Even nearly a decade after the commission report, there was not much change in the plight of the Kannadigas.

Kerala Tulu Academy Chairman Umesh M Salian said that government offices in Kasargod is often considered as a place for punishment transfers and for this reason most of the officers serving here would be more focussed on getting transfer to other places rather than the concerns of the people.