Dehradun school wins Hindi debate

The two-day inter-school 9th AajTak Hindi Debate Competition, which was organised to spread awareness about the importance of our mother tongue Hindi among the youth, concluded at Vasant Valley School on Friday. After several rounds of heated argument and fluent Hindi elocution, Welham Girls' School emerged the winner.

The topic for the final round of the debate was "Is efficient dictatorship better than an inefficient democracy?" which saw a fierce competition between Vasant Valley School of Delhi and Welham Girls' School of Dehradun, Uttarakhand.

Anjana Om Kashyap, the award-winning journalist of AajTak, was the chief guest of the competition who declared the names of the winners and rewarded them.

Kashyap also answered journalism-related questions asked by the students and audience. She also heaped praise on the students who took part in the final debate.

"I am happy to learn that this topic is under discussion today as it is one of my favourite topics in the newsroom. In the future, we should strive to establish a political system where the real power lies in the hands of people," Kashyap said.

Jiya Gupta, Pravisha Verma and Medha Ajitsaria were part of the winning team. Holding the big trophy in their hands, they said: "It feels great to have won this competition. It was a very new kind of exposure as we have never done a turncoat before. More so, we are proud that we won a Hindi debate because it's our mother tongue."

Yash Gupta, Sehej Kaur and Advaya Gulati from Vasant Valley School team came second. Sehaj told India Today TV: "We think the award is well deserved. It was a tough competition. We tried our best but the winner team performed very well."

Over 100 students from 36 schools participated in the competition. Rohit Singh Rawat from Hermann Gneiner, Bhimtal, who stood fourth, said: "We all learnt a new format of debate on this platform and had a very good experience. We will come better prepared next time and win the next debate at Vasant Valley."

The principal and teachers of Vasant Valley School were also very happy and said with assertion that the purpose of this competition was to introduce our mother language to the English medium schools in the Capital and to explain its importance, which seems to be complete.