New Delhi: The initial enthusiasm for classical status for Odia seems to be petering out.

There will be no awardee in classical Odia under the maiden President's Awards to be given away shortly to researchers for their work in classical languages.

Odia was granted classical language status by the Centre in 2014. The other languages to have received the status were Malayalam (2013), Kannada and Telugu (2008), Sanskrit (2005) and Tamil (2004).

The government had earlier started President's Awards for researchers in classical Sanskrit and Tamil. In 2016, the Human Resource Development (HRD) Ministry decided to start similar awards in Odia, Kannada, Malayalam and Telugu.

In May 2016, the ministry wrote to the state governments of Odisha, Kerala, Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh and Telangana and universities in these five states to send names of eminent literary persons for the award.

While 18 nominations were received for awards in Kannada, 13 came for Telugu, six for Malayalam and only three for Odia.

An expert committee set up by the HRD Ministry met here last month to decide the winners. Of the three applications received for the award in Odia, one was incomplete. Another applicant did not fulfil the age criteria. The application of the third person was rejected because he had no work to his credit on classical areas of the language.

"The recommendations of the expert committee are under the consideration of the HRD minister," an official source said.

However, there was competition and the experts had elaborate debate on selecting the awardees.

Panchanan Mohanty, the coordinator of the Centre for Endangered Languages and Mother Tongue Studies at the University of Hyderabad, blamed the researchers and institutions for the poor response to the award.

"Every individual researcher should apply for the award instead of waiting for the state government or the university recommending their names," he said.