Lok Sabha Question No. 419 (UNSTARRED), answered on 2024-02-05
Subject: Bhartiya Bhasha Utsav 2023
Ministry: Education
Asked by: Lallu Singh, Bharatiben Dhirubhai Shyal, Vinod Chavda, Arvind Kumar Sharma, Shankar Lalwani, Ratansinh Magansinh Rathod, Pradeep Kumar Singh, Dinesh Lal "Nirahua" Yadav, Sanjay Bhatia

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

## LOK SABHA

## UNSTARRED QUESTION NO-419

ANSWERED ON- 05/02/2024

## BHARTIYA BHASHA UTSAV 2023

419. SHRI LALLU SINGH:

DR. BHARATIBEN DHIRUBHAI SHIYAL: SHRI VINOD L. CHAVDA: DR. ARVIND KUMAR SHARMA: SHRI SHANKAR LALWANI: SHRI RATANSINH MAGANSINH RATHOD: SHRI PRADEEP KUMAR SINGH: SHRI DINESH LAL YADAV 'NIRAHUA':

SHRI SANJAY BHATIA:

Will the Minister of EDUCATION be pleased to state:

- (a) the aims and vision of the Bhartiya Bhasha Utsav 2023 and the details of the summit thereof; (b) the ways by which the New Education Policy aims to integrate technology into the  new  education  system  in  order  to  promote  and  preserve  rich  linguistic heritage of the country; and the  steps  taken  by  the  Government  to  leverage  technology  for  Bhartiya
- (c) languages and promote search engine localization?

## ANSWER

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

(a):  The  National  Education  Policy  (NEP),  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

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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.

(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

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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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