Karnataka Border Area Development Authority (KBADA) chairman Dr C Somashekhara said a team from Maharashtra governemnt had started a drive six months ago offering incentives to set up more Marathi-medium schools inside Karnataka in an around Belagavi district.
A delegation from Maharashtra had come to the border regions of Karnataka and started a drive by making an offer of more grants and more facilities to those schools which impart education in Marathi, Somashekhara said.
Explaining the activities of KBADA, Somashekhara said the authority was established by the state government in 2010 to protect the interest of Kannadigas in the border regions outside Karnataka. According to him, there are 19 districts outside Karnataka that have a sizeable Kannada-speaking population.
There are about 980 villages in 63 taluks of 19 districts where Kannadigas are living. The role of our authority is to protect their entity, culture and language. We are also doing the job of instilling confidence among them, Somashekhara said.
When we got the news that a team had conducted a survey in and around Belagavi and offered more grants to Marathi-medium schools and more incentives to the teachers, we swung into action due to which the campaign stopped, he explained.
Somashekhara said the authority along with some organisations in Belagavi protested saying that the Maharashtra delegation visiting Karnataka and opening more Marathi schools here was unlawful.
The Maharashtra government had come inside Karnataka to open more Marathi schools in and around Belagavi. A conspiracy was hatched to offer more grants to the schools, incentives to teachers, attractive scholarship to the students and build hostels, which we have stopped, he claimed.