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Today's Paper | May 21, 2024

Published 17 Apr, 2014 06:32am

From the past pages of dawn: 1944: Seventy years ago: ‘80pc of recruits illiterate’

LUCKNOW: A party of Pressmen for Lucknow and Allahabad was taken round certain military units to study methods of Army education.

At the end of the tour, a [senior] Army officer, addressing the journalists, said that the army was at present conducting a big adult education movement. About 80 per cent of recruits to the Indian Army, he added, were illiterate and the aim of army education was to mould them into useful men who would be good soldiers during the war and good citizens after it. For obvious reasons, he continued, unorthodox methods had been applied, but he was glad the results had shown that those methods had proved successful. He explained that the difficulty arising out of the many languages spoken in India had largely been solved by the adoption of what was called “Fauj Urdu” or spoken Hindustani written in Roman script.

[Meanwhile;] Major-General C. E. R. G. Alban, the Commander, Bombay, today [April 16] paid his own tribute to the work of the thousands of soldiers, sailors and airmen who fought the Bombay docks fire. “It was a remarkable example of Inter-Service team work,” he said. (Dawn, Delhi)

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