Lok Sabha Question No. 114 (STARRED), answered on 2023-12-11
Subject: Bharatiya Bhasha Utsav 2023
Ministry: Education
Asked by: Dharambir Singh, Bholanath (B.P. Saroj)

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

## LOK SABHA STARRED QUESTION NO-114

ANSWERED ON- 11/12/2023

## BHARATIYA BHASHA UTSAV 2023

*114.  SHRI DHARAMBIR SINGH: SHRI BHOLANATH (B. P. SAROJ):

- Will the Minister of EDUCATION be pleased to state: (a) the aims and objectives of the Bharatiya Bhasha Utsav 2023 and the details of the summit thereof; (b) the details on the manner in which the New Education Policy aims to integrate technology in the new education system to promote and preserve rich linguistic heritage of the country; and the  steps  taken  by  the  Government  to  leverage  technology  for  Bharatiya
- (c) languages and promote search engine localization?

## ANSWER

MINISTER OF EDUCATION (SHRI DHARMENDRA PRADHAN)

- (a)  to (c):     A statement is laid on the table of the House.
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STATEMENT REFERRED TO IN REPLY TO PARTS (a) TO (c) OF LOK SABHA STARRED QUESTION NO.114 TO BE ANSWERED ON 11.12.2023 ASKED BY SHRI  DHARAMBIR  SINGH,  HON'BLE  M.P.  AND  SHRI  BHOLANATH  (B.  P. SAROJ), HON'BLE M.P. REGARDING 'BHARATIYA BHASHA UTSAV 2023'

(a): The  National  Education  Policy,  2020  lays  a  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.    In  addition  to this, educational  institutions  are  being encouraged to organize activities to celebrate the linguistic and cultural diversity of the  country  from  time  to  time.    The  Bharatiya  Bhasha  Utsav  is  one  such  activity being  organized  by  the  Government.    The  programme  is  focused  on  celebrating diversity  and  developing  harmony  and  national  integrity  through  Indian  languages. As part of this utsav, 75 days of celebrations are being organized in various schools, colleges and other institutions across the country involving students, teachers and other staff by organizing activities like exhibitions, language quiz, speech, debates, extempore in different languages, poetry recitation and essay writing competition in various  languages,  creative  performances  depicting  lok  parampara  and  folk  art forms, street plays  and dramas, etc.   This  utsav  would  be  culminating  on  11 th December 2023 which is the birthday of great poet and freedom fighter Subramania Bharathi.

(b)  &  (c):      National  Education  Policy  2020  places  strong  emphasis  leveraging technology  for  strengthening  various  facets  of  education  including  preserving  and promoting the nation's diverse linguistic heritage/diversity. For leveraging technology for  Bharatiya  Bhashas,  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.  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 till end of Secondary stage  i.e. from pre-primary classes till class XII as an optional medium in addition to other existing options.   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.

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.

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