A day after it emerged that the Class 12 English textbook in Tamil Nadu stated that Tamil language was 2,300 years old and Sanskrit was 4,000 years old, Minister for School Education K.A. Sengottaiyan said that the department would initiate action against persons responsible for the error.
“As soon it was brought to our notice, we have informed heads of schools to ensure that the change is conveyed to the students. Everyone knows and respects the history of Tamil as the oldest language and the government will ensure such errors do not happen in the future,” the Minister said.
Minister for Tamil official language K. Pandiarajan said that they had taken cognisance of the error. “The government has no intention of disrespecting the Tamil language and steps will be taken to correct the error,” he said, speaking on the sidelines of an event in Tiruvallur.
Political leaders including DMK chief M.K. Stalin had slammed the government and questioned as to why an error like this which glorified Sanskrit had found place in the textbook.
In a warm-up exercise preceding a prose text, students were asked to arrange languages by the date of their origin. In this, 300BC (BCE) has been specified as the origin of Tamil Language and 2000 BC (BCE) has been specified as the date of origin of Sanskrit.