Lok Sabha Question No. 1217 (UNSTARRED), answered on 2023-12-11
Subject: Promotion of Regional Languages
Ministry: Education
Asked by: Vellalath Kochukrishnan Nair. Sreekandan

## GOVERNMENT OF INDIA MINISTRY OF EDUCATION DEPARTMENT OF HIGHER EDUCATION

## LOK SABHA UNSTARRED QUESTION NO- 1217

ANSWERED ON - 11/12/2023

## PROMOTION OF REGIONAL LANGUAGES

## 1217. SHRI V.K. SREEKANDAN:

Will the Minister of EDUCATION be pleased to state:

- (a) whether it is a fact that the Government is emphasizing the integration of technology in promoting regional languages, including its role in teaching, training, examination and translating educational materials;
- (b) if so, the details thereof;
- (c) whether it is also true that the directions have been to facilitate a seamless transition from the present education ecosystem to one rooted in the country's languages; and
- (d) whether it is a fact that the fusion of Indian languages and technology will open doors to limitless possibilities for the talent pool of the country?

## ANSWER

## MINISTER OF STATE IN THE MINISTRY OF EDUCATION (DR. SUBHAS SARKAR)

(a) & (b): The National Education Policy (NEP), 2020 lays lot of stress on promoting multilingualism and making efforts to keep Indian languages vibrant. NEP provides, wherever possible, for medium of instruction to be in the home language/ mother tongue/ local language/ regional language upto at least class 5 and preferably upto class 8. The policy also provides for making available high quality text books in home language/ mother tongue and encouraging teachers to use bilingual approach while teaching. In order to achieve this objective the Government is integrating multilingualism at school and higher education levels by providing reading materials in Indian languages so that students have the choice to study in their mother tongue/local language. NEP recommends integration of technology for promotion of all scheduled and non-scheduled Indian Languages. In order to further facilitate education through Indian languages, Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) has also asked its affiliated schools to consider using Indian languages, as enumerated in the Schedule 8 of the Indian Constitution, as the medium of instruction from Foundational stage

-2- till end of Secondary stage i.e. from pre-primary classes till class XII as an optional medium in addition to other existing options.

(c) & (d): National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT) is running a Bhasha Sangam programme as also a Machine Translation cell. The Bhasha Sangam program aims to enhance language learning by encouraging learners to learn basics of 22 languages. This endeavour is seen as a significant step in fostering language understanding and promoting a deeper appreciation of diverse culture through educational system. To facilitate the dissemination of education in a child's native language, NCERT has established a Translation Cell which is translating various books into the scheduled languages. Course material including text books and teaching resource are available on Digital Infrastructure for Knowledge Sharing (DIKSHA) portal in 33 Indian Languages. All Indian Council for Technical Education (AICTE) and University Grants Commission (UGC) have leveraged Anuvadini App to translate books for Under Graduate and Post Graduate courses and Technical books like engineering and law in multiple Indian languages. The translated books are available on eKUMBH portal. National Eligibility cum Entrance Test (NEET) has been conducted in 13 languages. Joint Entrance Exam (JEE) is now conducted in 13 languages. Technical education is being imparted in certain (AICTE) approved institutions in 8 regional languages. Central Institute of Indian Languages (CIIL), Mysuru, under this Ministry makes use of Technology in its projects like Linguistic Data Consortium of Indian Languages (LDC-IL), National Testing Service (NTS) and Bharatavani Scheme for the development of Language Corpora and Language Question Items Retrieval.

AICTE is also promoting Integration of technology which makes the teaching and learning process effective. It has initiated Technical Book Writing Scheme under which original books are published as per the latest development in the field of Technical Education to facilitate seamless transition from the present system of technical education in English language to all 22 scheduled Indian languages.

Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MEITY) has launched Mission Digital India Bhashini in the year 2022 to develop core language technologies for speech and text translation for 22 scheduled Indian languages in the open source. Currently, 290 pre trained AI driven language models have been made available in Bhashini platform in 22 scheduled languages for text to text translation and 10 Indian scheduled languages and English for voice to voice translation, transcription and dictation. The Bhashini open Application Programming Interface (APIs) for language translation in text and voice have

been list in API Setu (http://apisetu.gov.in). Bhashini APIs are available for anyone to integrate with any application. The Artificial Intelligence (AI) models of ASR (Automatic Speech Recognition) can be used for voice search in Indian languages. Unicode support in search engines helps search in Indian languages. All 22 scheduled languages are represented in the Unicode standard, and facilitates searching in Indian languages.

The availability of reading material in Indian languages will provide students with the option to study in their own languages.

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