Odisha Secures Centre of Excellence for Classical Pali at CUO

03 Oct 2026, 12:30 by Vinay Kakkad · KalingaTV

Bhubaneswar: Five premier academic institutions across the country will host specialized Centres of Excellence dedicated to ancient Indian languages, following formal approval granted by the Union Ministry of Education.

The national project, sanctioned through an official memorandum issued by the ministry, designates host campuses to advance scholarly research, archival digitisation, long-term preservation, and public outreach across five distinct tongues: Assamese, Bengali, Pali, Prakrit, and Marathi.

Operational directives have been transmitted directly to the Vice-Chancellors of each selected institution to begin rollout immediately. Under the distributed institutional framework:

Assamese: Tezpur University will establish the Centre of Excellence for Studies in Classical Assamese.

Bengali: Visva-Bharati University has been selected as the institutional home for Classical Bengali.

Pali: The Central University of Odisha will house the specialised facility for Classical Pali.

Prakrit: The Central University of Gujarat has been designated to lead initiatives in Classical Prakrit.

Marathi: Deccan College Post-Graduate and Research Institute in Pune will manage the Centre of Excellence for Classical Marathi.

The sanction has drawn strong public backing from state leadership, particularly in the east and northeast, where regional administrations had actively lobbied the Union government for institutional infrastructure following the languages’ recognition under classical status.

In Bhubaneswar, Odisha Chief Minister Mohan Charan Majhi characterised the approval of the Pali centre at the Central University of Odisha as a landmark development for safeguarding the nation’s broader civilisational and linguistic knowledge. Offering congratulations to the university and its associated project teams, Majhi emphasised that formal institutional backing will fortify scholarship and public appreciation of Pali, citing its deep historical integration with India’s intellectual, cultural, and spiritual lineages.