Following ‘Konkani Rashtramanyatai Dis’ on August 20, NT NETWORK looks at whether a Konkani degree can translate into a sustainable career as opportunities expand beyond teaching and translation
VINIKA VISWAMBHARAN
NT NETWORK
Konkani has Constitutional recognition and official status in Goa, and its presence extends across literature, culture, and an increasingly digital space. But for students choosing to specialise in the language today, the bigger question lies ahead: where can the degree take them once they graduate?
After the degree
A producer at The Voice for Goem, Devita Khule, who completed her master’s in Konkani at Goa University, initially considered translation before entering media production. Her Konkani training has since helped her work move to a
different field.
“Since I have read about the Goan culture during my master’s and undergrad, it helped me relate to the concepts,” she says, adding that her language training helped her maintain the authenticity through the language.
She now sees opportunities in sub-editing, anchoring, production, website writing and translation. However, she says, the degree needs to be complemented by another skill. Her experience is echoed by journalist Usha Zaraunkar who works at a Konkani daily. Zaraunkar completed her MA in Konkani in 2012 before entering journalism.
But she soon discovered that journalism required skills beyond her literature training, including confidence, story construction, and identifying an angle. “We had to teach ourselves back then, but now I’ve heard there’s various skill enhancement courses in today’s Konkani curriculum,” she says.
That distinction, between knowing the language and knowing how to apply it professionally, is also reflected in how Goa University’s Konkani curriculum has evolved.
Beyond the syllabus
At Goa University’s MA Konkani programme, 40 students are currently enrolled in the first year and 23 in the second, showing that students continue to choose the language as a field of study. First-year MA Konkani student at Goa University, Akanksha Terane, initially considered teaching, but her coursework has opened her to a wider range of possibilities. Translation, short film-making, media writing, linguistics, folklore and theatre are among the areas she is exposed to, while she also sees opportunities in subtitling, anchoring, hosting, and publishing.
Her classmate, Vansh Naik says he entered the course partly because he wanted to contribute to his mother tongue. “There are so many new avenues opened up for the language,” he says.
An internship as a Konkani news scriptwriter at a news channel gave him an opportunity to test one of those avenues. The experience, he says, made him more open to journalism as a career.
Naik believes students also need to rethink the assumption that their prospects are limited to existing Konkani jobs. “We can also create our own,” he says, while pointing to the potential of a Konkani production house. “If one of us were to set up a production house for Konkani movies, that itself creates so many jobs in Konkani for writers, directors, actors, dubbing artists and others working in film,” he says.
From the same department, second-year MA student Yeshwant Dilip Bhat had considered teaching, translation, and eventually a PhD, but also sees filmmaking as another avenue through which his Konkani training could be applied. His interest, like Naik’s, is not simply in finding a job labelled “Konkani”, but in finding ways to take the language into another field.
That is also changing what students expect from their education. Naik found this particularly evident during his internship, where he developed his Konkani typing and gained exposure to the computational side of working with the language.
Naik believes the university curriculum could offer more practical exposure, particularly when studying regional dialects. “Instead of learning about dialectal variations only through textbooks, students could interact with speakers across Goa, gaining first-hand experience. That could also encourage research into Konkani’s linguistic and cultural diversity,” he suggests.
A curriculum in transition
The shift is already being reflected in the way the university is changing what it teaches. Head of the Department of Konkani and principal of Vidya Prabodhini College of Commerce, Education, Computer and Management, Porvorim, Bhushan Bhave says the curriculum has been changing in response to the widening range of careers available to language graduates.
Over the past eight to 10 years, the Board of Studies has introduced courses in areas such as filmmaking, translation, documentary-making and folk studies alongside traditional subjects such as literature, grammar and the history of the language.
“Just getting a BA degree or MA degree will not fetch good employment for students,” says Bhave.
Under the National Education Policy (NEP), the department has also introduced skill-development courses in translation, interpretation, anchoring and compering, as well as vocational courses linked to publication. Students can learn DTP, proofreading, editing, page layout, and other aspects of book production.
The aim, says Bhave, is to equip students with additional skills that can help them enter emerging fields, take up projects or create opportunities for themselves.
The skill gap
Like others, retired professor and HoD of English at Goa University, translator, poet and critic Kiran Budkuley, who works across English, Hindi, Konkani and Marathi, also believes that a mere degree is not enough.
“All the kinds of openings that are available to other language graduates and PGs, are also available albeit on a modest scale to the Konkani graduates provided concerned graduates take additional training in relevant areas of interest,” she says.
She lists journalism, translation, voice modulation and research methodology among the areas students can pursue, along with newscasting, reporting, radio, freelancing, proofreading, acting, playwrighting, direction, scriptwriting, lyric writing, interpretation and content
creation.
Budkuley identifies gaps among Konkani graduates in grammar and orthography, pronunciation and vocabulary, reading skills and practical translation. “Competence and specialised training is needed in every area,” she says. “Preparation, training and aptitude are vital for any job. Konkani graduates/PGs can be no
exception.”
She believes language laboratories could be used more effectively to develop pronunciation and voice modulation, while also pointing to a shortage of trained resource persons in specialised areas such as Konkani journalism, translation studies, and digital content creation.
Teaching remains key
Teaching meanwhile continues to be the most familiar career path for Konkani graduates.
President of the Goa Konkani Akademi, Purnanand Chari believes the scope of Konkani has gone up manifold compared with the past. He links this partly to Konkani’s status as Goa’s official language.
“After Konkani became the ‘Rajbhas’ of the State of Goa, now in every field the knowledge of Konkani is mandatory,” he says.
Chari points to teaching positions from kindergarten to graduate level as one example of employment created by the language’s official status. The Akademi, he says, also supports graduates through workshops, seminars, specialised training and assignments in translation, transliteration and research, along with scholarships and annual awards.
Budkuley however cautions that while teaching remains a secure service domain for many graduates, prolonged contractual employment can affect any job security and enthusiasm.
Konkani in government
Konkani’s official status gives it a defined role within Goa’s government administration. But what does that role look like in practice? At the Directorate of Official Languages, senior translator in Konkani, Seby Fernandes says the department’s principal responsibility is implementing Goa’s official language in government administration.
Government staff are trained to use Konkani for administrative work. The Directorate also works on technical terminology and glossaries so that consistent Konkani terminology can be used in government and higher education. “We have to create and finalise the terminologies of the subjects in Konkani,” says Fernandes.
But when asked whether there are specific government designations for Konkani graduates, Fernandes is clear. “No, only translators.” Other government positions, he notes, generally require basic graduation rather than a specific Konkani
qualification.
There are, however, language-related opportunities around government and research work that do not necessarily take the form of permanent Konkani posts.
Bhave recalls one such example. Around two years ago, forest officials approached him while conducting an inventory of forests in Goa and the Western Ghats. They needed people with sound knowledge of Konkani and local knowledge of plants, including their species, flowering, and fruiting periods, uses and medicinal properties.
“Our students come from villages. They have a lot of knowledge about this. So there’s an opportunity here to be hired for such surveys,” says Bhave.
He also points to central government meetings on agriculture, forests, biodiversity and other subjects held in Goa, where Konkani speakers may be required to translate material and prepare minutes and reports.
Konkani in public life
This raises a broader question about how widely Konkani is actually used outside formal language institutions.
For Terane, the professional possibilities of the language cannot be separated from how visible Konkani is in everyday life. She contrasts Goa with other states where regional languages are more commonly seen on billboards, shop signs and in textbooks. “If it was integrated from an early age, then many people will naturally learn Konkani too,” she notes, arguing that greater exposure outside the classroom could make the language more familiar and encourage its everyday use.
Programme director of Library and Information Science at Goa University, Milind Mhamal believes the official status of Konkani should result in much more government information being made available in the language. “Government schemes, budgets and other public information should also be available in Konkani alongside English,” he says.
The issue of visibility also extends to the digital world. Mhamal is sceptical of relying entirely on machine translation. “It is not an exact translation,” he says. At the same time, he believes the amount of Konkani content available online has a direct bearing on the quality of language technology.
“The more content we have on the web in Konkani, the more accurate the translation will be. Compared to languages such as Hindi and Marathi, there is still much less Konkani content available digitally,” he says.
The digital turn
At Goa University, assistant professor of computer science in Goa Business School, Taleigao and co-investigator on the Vidyaapati Project, Ramdas Karmali is working on bidirectional machine translation between Konkani and Hindi under the Bhashini initiative.
“For all these NLP projects, the main thing that you require is the data,” says Karmali. Much of Konkani’s existing literature, he points out, still has not been digitised. That creates a role for people with a background in the language. The Vidyaapati Project has a team working on manually creating and preparing linguistic data alongside computer scientists developing the technology. “All these projects require people with literature or linguistics training in that language,” he says.
Kapila Desai and Pratiksha Parab, who work on the Vidyaapati Project, illustrate what those roles look like.
Desai, a senior research associate and linguist with MA in Hindi, and Parab, a junior research associate who completed her MA in Konkani at Goa University in 2021, work on translation, data creation and tagging, speech transcription, machine translation and model evaluation. Their work also includes named entity recognition, part-of-speech tagging and identifying multi-word expressions.
“For a language graduate, training a model in terms of translation can mean preparing datasets, checking machine-generated translations, transcribing speech, annotating linguistic material or evaluating language models,” explains Desai. This once again points out to needing more skills or qualifications besides the MA degree.
Karmali, however, says awareness remains one of the challenges. “You need to change your thinking and move out of that pure literature kind of approach that some of the students take,” he says. “Sometimes you wouldn’t even know that these opportunities are available.”
The digital push has a preservation value as well. Workshops linked to the project are working towards digitising Konkani books and making them available through platforms such as Wikisource. “If all this goes online and becomes available, it would, be invaluable to researchers,” says Karmali.
Senior programme officer at IIIT Hyderabad’s Open Knowledge Initiatives team, Subodh Kulkarni, believes digitisation should also become part of how language students are trained. “Students need to be given exposure to various technologies,” he says. “If they don’t know about digitisation now, how will they be equipped to handle digitisation in the future?” he notes, pointing to natural language processing, translation, transliteration and text-to-speech technologies. Kulkarni also conducts workshops on Konkani digitisation and open-knowledge tools, introducing students to the practical processes of preserving and making Konkani content available online.
Keeping Konkani relevant
The Goa Konkani Akademi is also trying to widen that ecosystem through training and professional exposure.
Chari says the Akademi has conducted workshops and seminars with experts from different fields, including digital journalism and theatre.
He also points to interest in Konkani among non-Konkani speakers and foreigners in Goa, suggesting that the language’s relevance extends beyond its traditional population.
Yet one gap remains: there is no clear picture of where Konkani graduates actually go after completing their degrees.
“There is no formal state-wide mechanism to track graduates,” says Bhave. “Colleges maintain alumni information and placement cells and communicate opportunities to students through channels such as WhatsApp, but there is no consolidated system showing how many graduates move into teaching, translation, media, research or newer areas such as language technology.”
