Visva-Bharati on Thursday formed a six-member committee to draft the Bengali version of the detailed text in English and Hindi sent by the Centre for inscription on plaques to replace the ones installed by former vice-chancellor Bidyut Chakrabarty that left out the name of Rabindranath Tagore.

The committee is headed by acting director of culture Amal Pal, and has four other teachers — acting director of the publishing department Amrit Sen, Hindi teacher Shakuntala Mishra, Bengali teacher Manabendra Mukhopadhyay and history teacher Anil Kumar. The sixth member is Nilanjan Bandyopadhyay, special officer at Rabindra Bhavana.

“Their assignment is to prepare the Bengali text in keeping with the 200-word text the Centre has sent in English and Hindi. They are also free to suggest changes to the English and Hindi texts, if they find it necessary,” a senior Visva-Bharati official said on Thursday.

The committee has been set up on the instructions of the Union education ministry. The plaques had been installed to mark Unesco’s World Heritage Site tag to Santiniketan. The process of replacing the plaques started with the Union education ministry on Tuesday sending a detailed text for the new plaques with Tagore’s name.

“Established in rural West Bengal in 1901 by the great Gurudev Rabindranath Tagore, Santiniketan was a cradle of learning and education firmly rooted in India’s classical traditions, aspiring to a concept of university humanity,” a part of the new text for the plaques reads. The new text sent by the Union ministry does not mention Prime Minister Narendra Modi, the chancellor of the central varsity, former vice-chancellor Chakrabarty.

The plaques without Tagore’s name had drawn sharp criticism from various quarters within India and abroad. Their inscription only bore the names of Modi and Chakrabarty, whose controversial five-year term ended on November 8.

People from various quarters, including politicians cutting across party lines, demanded the replacement of the plaques with those that would bear the name of Tagore, who founded both Santiniketan and Visva-Bharati.

The Trinamul Congress leadership pointed out that the prompt action by the Centre was a result of the party’s fortnight-long movement on the instructions of chief minister Mamata Banerjee.

“We started our unwavering movement on October 27 and it continued for 14 days, under instructions from our supreme leader, till the decision of the Centre arrived. It surely is a moral victory for us, the victory of our chief minister’s uncompromising stand against any slighting of Tagore’s legacy,” said Trinamul’s Bolpur MLA Chandranath Sinha, a member of Mamata’s cabinet who led the movement in Santiniketan.

“We will celebrate this, commemorate the occasion, but not right away. We will conduct a rally and organise events when the plaques are actually removed,” he added.

The BJP was unwilling to yield ground on the issue to Trinamul, also welcoming the central order and asserting that they too were firmly opposed to the decision to omit Tagore’s name from the plaques.

“If this notification had been sent a little earlier, it would have been better,” state BJP chief spokesperson Samik Bhattacharya said.

“We were never in agreement with the decision to omit Tagore’s name. We wanted this rectified as soon as possible. We welcome this decision by our government at the Centre,” he said.