SHILLONG: The Royal Thai Embassy under the leadership of Jesda Katavetin, Director General, Department of South Asian, Middle East and African Affairs, Ministry of Thailand and his official delegates, met a team from NEHU at Saw Aiom, Ri Kynjai, Umñiuh Khwan on Tuesday to discuss about the Thai-NEHU relationship and Thai-Northeast India in general.
The NEHU team comprised Vice Chancellor, SK Srivastava, Pro-VC, Henry Lamin, Registrar, JN Nayak and Streamlet Dkhar, Dean, school of humanities.
The objective of the meeting was to strengthen cultural relations, research on folklore, folk theatre, language and tourism.
In his address, Katavetin stressed upon the close contact of Thai universities and Indian universities by working together in the field of language, culture and tourism.
He mentioned that initially there were six Thai universities involved in the Indian studies programmes whic has now expanded to eleven universities within two years. He also expressed hope on strengthening the relationship between both the universities as the MoU was signed between NEHU and Chulalongkorn University (CU), Bangkok.
SK Srivastava expressed interest in going forward with the planned projects with the CU after the MoU was officially signed and assured full support from the administration and academics and to complete the projects taken by NEHU within the stipulated time with positive outcome.
In her speech as an academic coordinator, Streamlet gave a brief report on the research project entitled ‘CU- NEHU innovative ASEAN-India Academic Cooperation’ which was given patronage by Princess Maha Chakri Sirindhorn who visited NEHU in November 25, 2016 and was impressed on working together on Austro-Asiatic languages of Thai-Khasi.
The project was supported by the Thai Research Fund (TRF). Dkhar said that the signing of the MoU between CU and NEHU came into reality on January 10, 2019 at CU by VC NEHU, SK Srivastava and the President, CU, Bundhit Eua-arporn in the presence of Chutintorn Gongsakdi and Suchitra Durai, ambassadors of Thailand and India and the official delegates from NEHU.
The duration of the project is three years and the Department of Cultural and Creative Studies under DL Kharmawphlang started the project on exchange of Thai-Khasi folklore, traditional textile and craft designs used for Tourism purposes including Thai-Khasi theatre.
The Department of Linguistics under Saralin Lyngdoh, SK Singh and Streamlet started the multilingual dictionary and will adopt the approach of lexicography, the interdisciplinary study of designing and developing dictionaries.
For Hindi, MP Pandey, HoD, Hindi will be involved in the project along with Jean S Dkhar as an external expert for data validation.
JN Nayak, mentioned on the need to look for the socio-economic status of Northeast and to promote cultural tourism in Meghalaya while Henry Lamin spoke on the need to expand the project to other dialects.
