Why ₹643 crores spent on Sanskrit, ₹ 3 crore on flowers to greet Trumps, but ₹29 crore on five other languages

Prime Minister Narendra Modi led Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government has spent ₹643.84 crores on the promotion of Sanskrit in the last three years, a report in The Wire cited.

According to the reports by the Union Ministry of Culture, the amount spent in promotion of Sanskrit language is 22 times the total amount of ₹29 crore spent on other five classical Indian languages Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Malayalam and Odia.

Modi government has not created a separate fund for the promotion of Malayalam and Odia and has not established any centre of excellence to promote the other classical Indian languages, Hindustan Times reported.

This act of apparent discrimination irked netizens which led to a deluge of criticism on Twitter:

The Centre held that the Ministry of Human Resource Development (MHRD) had established the Rashtriya Sanskrit Sansthan – and allocated ₹643.84 crores to it in the last three years – in Delhi as nodal authority to promote Sanskrit. In 2019-20, the Sansthan was allocated ₹231.15 crores, ₹214.38 crores in 2018-19, and ₹198.31 crores in 2017-18, according to The Wire.

The incident that highlighted this fact was when DMK leader Dayanidhi Maran questioned the relevance of Sanskrit in Lok Sabha which prompted heated debate.

Dayanidhi Maran said in Lok Sabha that, crores of rupees were being spent on Sanskrit and questioned as to what the government had done for the classical language Tamil.

Can't we spend equally on all classical languages?, another Twitter user asked the same question.

The discrepancy in the expenditure on various languages and Sanskrit by the Modi government raises several questions which need to be answered:

• Why is a special treatment being given to Sanskrit?
• What has the government done for the development of the language if so much money has been spent on it?
• Where has all the money allocated for Sanskrit gone? Will the government give a detailed account of it?