Nepali deadline

Darjeeling, Aug. 20: The Gorkha Janmukti Vidyarthi Morcha today set a 20-day deadline for all advertisers in the hills to write hoardings in Nepali, failing which it would pull down the billboards.

The student wing of the Gorkha Janmukti Morcha also demanded that question papers for various state job exams be written in Nepali, apart from English and Bengali.

The demands were made on the 20th anniversary of the Nepali/Gorkha language being included in the Eight Schedule of the Constitution in 1992. Amrti Yonzone, the president of the Vidyarthi Morcha, said: “On the occasion of bhasha manyata diwas, we would like to request all advertisers who have put up hoardings in languages not understood by the hill people to have their content written in Nepali also. We are not against the content being written in other languages. But we want the local language to feature in the billboards.”

Many billboards in the hills are written in Bengali and that might be the reason for the outfit to raise the demand for the Nepali content. “We have set a 20-day deadline for the inclusion of Nepali language in the billboards, failing which we will be forced to bring them down,” said Yonzone.