Agartala, June 14 -On demand of adoption of Roman script for the Kokborak language, TIPRA Indigenous Students Federation (TISF), the student wing of the main opposition party TIPRA Motha, on Wednesday took out a rally in Agartala.
Hundreds of indigenous students participated in the rally that started from Vivekananda stadium and proceeded towards the Raj Bhavan.
The student organisation wanted to submit a memorandum to Governor Satyadev Narayan Arya but were stopped by security forces in the Circuit House area.
The participants said that the demand for Roman or English script for Kokborok is a long pending issue and which is more than five decades old but subsequent governments be it Communist, Congress or the present BJP led is not resolved it despite majority of the indigenous population are in favour of Roman script and so TISF is organising this movement.
The student organization blocked the airport road and agitated on their demand as they expressed dissatisfaction with the prolonged delay in resolving the script issue.
They viewed that despite the recommendations of several commissions in favor of the Roman script, no government, including the present one, has taken the matter seriously.
Recently it was noticed that in many CBSE affiliated schools which are English medium, during the board examination the students were compelled to write answers in Bengali script for Kokborok though they are much more comfortable writing in English and after that the issue had again revived.
The tribal students hoped that the Governor is well aware of the long pending issue regarding the adoption of the Kokborak language with the Roman script and hopefully resolve their issue.
Meantime, the state government viewed that unlike Tripura Board of Secondary Education, CBSE does not have provision for setting question papers or replying answers for any subject including Kakborak in two languages.
Kokborak, the most widely spoken language among the indigenous population of Tripura, constitutes 31 percent of the total population of approximately 4 million.
