A decision by the Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE), the country's largest school board, to disallow students from writing board exams in any language other than Hindi and English has left three Urdu-medium schools of the Maulana Azad National Urdu University (MANUU) in a fix.

The MANUU "model schools" in Hyderabad, Nuh (Haryana) and Darbhanga (Bihar) offer education in Urdu. The schools are affiliated to the CBSE, which does not officially recognise any medium in terms of language, rather requiring students to pick a language of their choice while filling up their admission forms.

The governing body of the CBSE in June decided that answer papers written in any language other than Hindi and English without the board's permission would not be evaluated. Only Delhi-based schools will be allowed to exercise the option of seeking this permission.

The board had this year taken note of students under its Vijayawada region writing answers in Urdu without receiving any go-ahead from the CBSE. These students are not from MANUU schools.

"The concerned school may be instructed by the regional office that the answer books of students who write answers in medium other than Hindi or English without approval of the board shall not be evaluated. In spite of these instructions, if any student voluntarily writes answers in medium other than Hindi or English against Board's policy, his/her result will be declared without awarding any marks in that subject," the minutes of the GB meeting said.

MANUU started the three model schools in 2010. Officials from two of these schools said that the CBSE had granted them affiliation with full knowledge that their medium of learning was Urdu. They said the students of the MANUU schools had been getting question papers in English, Hindi and Urdu till 2020. From 2021, the board stopped providing question papers in Urdu.

For the past three years, the students of these three schools had continued to write their answers in Urdu although the question papers had been sent in English and Hindi. After the latest decision of the CBSE, the students of these schools will no longer be allowed to write their answers in Urdu.

"The CBSE held no discussions with us before deciding to stop sending question papers in Urdu too. Our students are facing difficulty in understanding the questions since they are not in Urdu. We have informed the CBSE about the difficulties the students are facing. The board has not resolved the problem yet," an official of a MANUU school said.

Afroz Alam, a professor of political science at MANUU, said the National Education Policy advocates education in the mother tongue and the CBSE's actions are against the spirit of the NEP. "Once the students start learning in Urdu, they should be allowed to appear for examinations in that medium. It would be unfair to ask them to write in English or Hindi," he said.

Sanyam Bhardwaj, controller of examinations of the CBSE, refused to acknowledge the MANUU schools as Urdu-medium schools. “There are Urdu-medium schools only in Delhi and according to their requirements, question papers are provided in Urdu,” Bhardwaj wrote in an email response to this newspaper.