Haryana to honour litterateurs every year

Chief Minister Manohar Lal Khattar today said the Haryana Granth Academy will honour 10 litterateurs with Rs 1 lakh and awards every year.
These awards will be named after Pandit Deendayal Upadhyay, Swami Vivekanand and former deputy chief minister Mangal Sen, he said.
Khattar also announced that cash award being given by the Haryana Sahitya Academy for first and second places will be increased from Rs 5 lakh to Rs 7 lakh and Rs 2.5 lakh to Rs 5 lakh respectively.
The Chief Minister, who is chairman of all the seven sahitya academies in the state, made the announcements after inaugurating the three-day Haryana Sahitya Sangam at the Indradhanush Auditorium in Panchkula.

The programme is being organised by the Information, Public Relations and Languages Department, Haryana Swarna Jayanti Celebrations Authority and sahitya academies.
He said all the publications of the Haryana Granth Academy would be digitalised under the Digital India programme.

Khattar honoured 92 writers with awards of Rs 84 lakh. These include 61 Hindi, 20 Punjabi and 11 Urdu litterateurs.
The Chief Minister emphasised on the need of physical, mental and intellectual development.
Hailing Prime Minister Narendra Modi as a role model for initiating a new style of governance by placing the nation before personal interests, he said if we are able to imbibe honesty and humanity everything would fall in place, and the country will progress by leaps and bounds.

Khattar also exhorted the writers to play a vital role in building a strong society through their writings.
He claimed Haryana is the land of Sanskrit study as scholars have been doing a lot of research on this language since long on the banks of river Saraswati which flowed through the state.
"It is the same land where the Rig Veda was scripted. Urdu originated in Haryana and the first literature in Punjabi was written in Hansi," Khattar claimed.
Describing the Haryana Sahitya Sangam programme as one of the best under the state's Swaran Jayanti Celebrations, he said it has helped in bringing about 2,000 litterateurs, thinkers and writers on a common platform.

Haryana has a glorious past and efforts are being made to ensure a bright future to the state's 2.5 crore population by improving their living standard, Khattar said.
Earlier, the Chief Minister also unveiled the Mascot 'Laddo' of the Haryana Sahitya Sangam and released two books authored by Dr Markande Ahuja.