Chennai: Several top Tamil Nadu forest officers (IFS) are baffled and finding it difficult to learn Tamil. They were asked by chief secretary Girija Vaidyanathan on Thursday to prepare agenda copies in Tamil for all wildlife board and minister review meetings in future.
Most of the forest offiers are from north Indian states and at present prepare agenda copies in English. In future they have to prepare notes also in Tamil, informed forest department sources said.
The instruction from the chief secretary came after forest minister Dindigul C. Seenivasan wondered in a meeting that how will the subject knowledge transfer to the rural public and field staff, if every department file and communication mode was in a foreign language. Participating in her maiden wildlife board meeting at secretariat on Thursday, Ms Vaidyanathan seconded the thoughts of the ministers and insisted that agenda copies are also available in Tamil.
She also went into the details of forestry and ecology raising the eyebrows of the IFS fraternity and emphasized that ecology needs an in-depth understanding. She also asked participants to be well prepared for future review meetings.
Coming to the rescue of his department, environment secretary Mohammad Nasimuddin and principal chief conservator of forests A. Basuvaraju translated and interpreted a few items on the agenda, of the total 35 discussed at the high-level meeting. The meeting, which lasted for more than an hour, discussed the wildlife protection Act 1972, tribal welfare in reserve forests and the conservation aspect, related to the eco sensitive areas.
“All these years our communication and meeting agendas were prepared in English and it is also easy for us to put files to the union environment and forest ministry when the documents are in English”, said a young forest officere. Preparing notes in Tamil will be little extra work but there are officers good in Tamil and we will reach out to them for preparing the meeting agenda in Tamil, he added.
