Will give copies of Vedas to all Rajya Sabha colleagues: Dharmendra Pradhan

Union education minister Dharmendra Pradhan on Wednesday said that he will give copies of the Vedas to all his Rajya Sabha colleagues. Pradhan was responding to a suggestion from vice-president Jagdeep Dhankar.

The minister also said that five regional centres of the government’s Vedic Board will be established in Karnatakas’s Sringeri, Uttarakhand’s Badrinath, Gujarat’s Dwarka, and Rameshwaram in Tamil Nadu, besides Guwahati.

Speaking during the Question Hour, Pradhan said that the Vedas are the original pool of knowledge in the Indian education system, and it was the Modi government that formalised the learning of Vedas by setting up the Vedic Board.

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“The Maharshi Sandipani Rashtriya Veda Sanskrit Shiksha Board was established by our government last year to promote the formal system of Vedic education,” Pradhan said. The Board was established on August 8, 2022.

He also said that currently, under the Board, there are 123 pathshalas across the country where 4600 students are studying and these centres have 632 teachers. In addition to that, there are 258 Guru Shishya Parampara Units, which have 2240 students and 430 teachers.

The government has also established model Vedic schools called Rashtriya Adarsh Veda Vidyalaya in six states, including Madhya Pradesh, Odisha, Gujarat, Assam, Karnataka and Uttarakhand. These schools, which the government said admits children on the merit of their proficiency in the Veda Bhusan and Veda Vibhushan in various grades, started in this academic year. The four Vedas – Rigveda, Samaveda, Yajurveda, and Atharva — are taught in the classes and students can also opt for science, english, mathematics, social science, computer science, and agriculture.