Jamshedpur, June 29: Ending the uncertainty clouding the fate of thousands of Oriya students in Jharkhand, the Orissa government has agreed to print NCERT text books (Std I to X) in Oriya for students in the state.

The decision was taken at a high-level meeting between representatives of the Orissa and Jharkhand governments here in the city today.

Jharkhand has a sizeable Oriya population, especially in the twin districts of Singhbhum bordering Mayurbhanj in the east and Sundergarh in the west. The state has more than 200 Oriya-medium schools.

The government was finding it difficult to translate NCERT books in Oriya leading to an acute shortage of text books. The crunch had also led to the closure and in some cases, conversion of several Oriya-medium schools into Hindi medium ones. The state had approached the Central Minority and Linguistic Committee, which directed both the states to amicably sort out the problem. Since then, both the governments had been trying to sort out the issue.

Today, human resources development minister Pashupati Nath Singh and joint secretary of the department, Kulwant Singh, along with Orissa’s mass education minister Surendra Nath Nayak and minister for law and revenue Biswa Bhusan Hari Chandan reached a consensus.

At the meeting, it was decided that the education ministry of Orissa would translate and print NCERT textbooks in Oriya for the Oriya-medium schools here. The state government will bear the cost of printing, publishing and distributing the books.

The need to translate the books in Oriya arose nearly two years ago when the state government introduced the CBSE curriculum.The meet also thrashed out yet another problem of scarcity of Oriya teachers in Oriya medium schools here. While the state government agreed to recruit teachers to fill up the vacancies, the Orissa government offered to train untrained teachers employed in various Oriya middle and high schools to improve the performance of students. Speaking to The Telegraph after the meeting, Nayak said the Jharkhand government was committed to reviving the Oriya medium schools here. “We will provide the necessary support at the government level for reviving the closed schools,” he said. Nayak said the HRD ministry would review the progress of printing NCERT books.