Last week at The Indian Express’s Idea Exchange session, Jawaharlal Nehru University’s (JNU) vice-chancellor Santhishree Dhulipudi Pandit said that the university is in the process of setting up a school of Indian studies and a school of Indian languages.

Speaking about the school for Indian languages, Pandit added that it is funded by corpus grants from every state government. So, the central government doesn’t give any money for the school. Every state government institutes its own chair professor and makes the selection. That professor works at JNU. Their salary and everything is looked after from the corpus grant.

Dhanya Pandit, a historian at the University of Mumbai, said she was hopeful that the university would establish a center for the study of the partition of India.

“She added: “We are looking at putting some of our courses online, especially M.A. in Political Science, M.A. in Public Administration, and Business Economics. There is a great demand for the introduction of Korean as an online course. We hope to make money there. Many of the Taiwanese and Korean industries are coming to India. So, if they recruit plumbers, mechanics, they want them to know languages – Korean, Taiwanese Mandarin. So for that certificate course, they are ready to give money to JNU.”