Union Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan has said that five regional centres of the government’s Vedic Board will be established in Karnatakas’s Sringeri, Uttarakhand’s Badrinath, Gujarat’s Dwarka, and Tamil Nadu's Rameshwaram and Assam's Guwahati.

Responding to a suggestion from Vice-President Jagdeep Dhankhar, he also said he would give copies of the Vedas to all his Rajya Sabha colleagues.

Speaking during the Question Hour, Pradhan said that the Vedas are the original pool of knowledge in the Indian education system, and it was the Modi government that formalised the learning of Vedas by setting up the Vedic Board.

“The Maharshi Sandipani Rashtriya Veda Sanskrit Shiksha Board was established by our government last year to promote the formal system of Vedic education,” Pradhan said.

The Board was established on August 8, 2022.

He also said that currently, under the Board, there are 123 pathshalas across the country where 4,600 students are studying and these centres have 632 teachers. In addition to that, there are 258 Guru Shishya Parampara Units, which have 2,240 students and 430 teachers.

The government has also established model Vedic schools called Rashtriya Adarsh Veda Vidyalaya in six states, including Madhya Pradesh, Odisha, Gujarat, Assam, Karnataka and Uttarakhand.

These schools admitted children on the merit of their proficiency in the Veda Bhusan and Veda Vibhushan in various grades from this academic year.