New Delhi, Oct. 9: Jawaharlal Nehru University will become the first university in India to teach and research all the 22 major Indian languages.

Its academic council on Friday approved a proposal to upgrade JNU's Centre of Indian Languages to a full-fledged school. It's now an arm of the university's School of Language, Literature and Culture Studies.

The council, though, deferred a proposal from the university's Sanskrit Centre for the introduction of certificate courses in yoga and Indian culture. Most of the council members argued that a research university like JNU should avoid certificate courses.

Many of them also argued that both the proposed courses, in their current form, covered only a few aspects of their subjects. Vice-chancellor M. Jagadesh Kumar asked the Sanskrit Centre to rework the proposals.

Anwar Alam, chairperson of the Centre of Indian Languages, welcomed the decision to upgrade the centre.

Launched in 1974, the centre initially offered master's and research programmes only in Urdu and Hindi. Over the past 10 years, it has been offering research programmes (MPhil and PhD) in Tamil, Kannada, Bangla, Odia and Marathi.

"Once the centre is upgraded to a school, we shall propose separate centres on 22 Indian languages that will offer both master's and research programmes," Alam said.

He said the proposed school would also set up centres for the Adivasi language, Northeastern languages and endangered languages.

Some academics criticised the council for not completely rejecting the proposal for certificate courses on Indian culture and yoga.

"Indian culture is a vast subject. It cannot be taught as a certificate course. JNU's mandate does not cover certificate courses," said C.P. Bhambri, professor emeritus at JNU. "The council should have rejected the proposal. It did not because the BJP doesn't want these courses to be rejected."

The Narendra Modi government has been promoting yoga education in a big way. Yoga has been included as a subject under the National Eligibility Test, conducted by the University Grants Commission to select candidates eligible to teach in colleges and universities.

At the academic council, many members had said that any course on Indian culture must be comprehensive and provide comparisons with contemporary culture in other parts of the world. The yoga course, they had argued, should cover all aspects of the yogic tradition.

JNU had in the past indeed offered a few certificate courses on languages, but these were foreign languages whose study it wanted to popularise in India.

Ajay Patnaik, president of the JNU teachers' association, said the proposed certificate courses should instead be offered as optional (additional) subjects that students from the university's other centres can study if they want.

"Certificate courses are for part-time students. It was felt that the proposed courses should be made more broad-based and offered as optional courses for (JNU's) regular students," Patnaik said.

Most student groups at the university are opposed to the certificate courses. Chinmaya Mahanand, a research scholar, said the government was pushing yoga to "saffronise" educational institutions.

Council members said they hadn't the time to discuss certain student demands, such as hostel facilities for all, extra weightage to minority students during admission, and less weightage to the viva voce in admission.