diff --git a/examples/nlp/text_classification/text_classification_with_bert.py b/examples/nlp/text_classification/text_classification_with_bert.py
index efbc5084bc54..2ae9469fb998 100644
--- a/examples/nlp/text_classification/text_classification_with_bert.py
+++ b/examples/nlp/text_classification/text_classification_with_bert.py
@@ -108,7 +108,12 @@
 @hydra_runner(config_path="conf", config_name="text_classification_config")
 def main(cfg: DictConfig) -> None:
     logging.info(f'\nConfig Params:\n{OmegaConf.to_yaml(cfg)}')
-    trainer = pl.Trainer(plugins=[NLPDDPPlugin()], **cfg.trainer)
+    try:
+        plugin = NLPDDPPlugin()
+    except (ImportError, ModuleNotFoundError):
+        plugin = None
+
+    trainer = pl.Trainer(plugins=plugin, **cfg.trainer)
     exp_manager(trainer, cfg.get("exp_manager", None))
 
     if not cfg.model.train_ds.file_path:
diff --git a/examples/nlp/token_classification/token_classification_train.py b/examples/nlp/token_classification/token_classification_train.py
index 65c7911b09af..3e3b0a245737 100644
--- a/examples/nlp/token_classification/token_classification_train.py
+++ b/examples/nlp/token_classification/token_classification_train.py
@@ -102,7 +102,12 @@
 
 @hydra_runner(config_path="conf", config_name="token_classification_config")
 def main(cfg: DictConfig) -> None:
-    trainer = pl.Trainer(plugins=[NLPDDPPlugin()], **cfg.trainer)
+    try:
+        plugin = NLPDDPPlugin()
+    except (ImportError, ModuleNotFoundError):
+        plugin = None
+
+    trainer = pl.Trainer(plugins=plugin, **cfg.trainer)
     exp_manager(trainer, cfg.get("exp_manager", None))
 
     if not cfg.pretrained_model: