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A Tech Summit for Overall Upgrade of All Indian Languages

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Category: Generalia

Published: 25 September 2023

Unlike the previous education policies of the Government of India, the NEP-2020 gives a great emphasis on the Indian languages. This is evident with a simple word frequency analysis done on the two documents of NEP-86 and NEP-2020 where it shows that the word "languages" is used 126 times in NEP-2020 as against 73 times in NEP-86. NEP-2020 also focuses more on mother tongues and the government has shown keen interest in developing them to ensure that the multiculturalism and multilingualism ethos of the country is maintained while ensuring unity in diversity. The past two years have already seen a lot of approaches being implemented by the GoI that is aimed to achieve this goal.
However, this is to be noted that India, as per the census report 2011, has a total of 270 mother tongues (including 121 enjoying the "language" status). The language policy of Government India has been a bit relaxed so far. This is also evident from the fact language policy is governed by both the central government as well as more than 26 state governments.
Given that even basic pedagogical content is scarce in these 259 mother tongues, it is a challenge to achieve the goals of providing mother tongue education by 2030. One way to overcome this challenge is through technology and rapid promotion of all Indian languages and mother tongues.

Language promotion involves several steps involving several stakeholders, including the language community concerned, the local administration and the government as well as the central government.
With promises made in NEP-2020, it is evident that the focus is going to shift on promotion of all Indian languages, instead of a select few such the scheduled languages. The status and prestige attached to the tag of “scheduled” language, currently enjoyed by 22 languages, will anyway percolate down to the rest of the languages and mother tongues of the country and every language community can at least preserve the domains that their languages are currently used in.
However, the issue of providing education in mother tongues is not a small task. Specially so because most of the Indian languages, including several Indian languages enjoying the status of scheduled languages, have very little content, even at the elementary education level. Content for kids in Indian languages, including even the largest languages like Hindi, are few and the young generation is shifting towards the languages that have more content in it (e.g. English). If this is the situation in Hindi, one can imagine the status of content in other Indian languages, let’s say Bodo, Maithili, Dogri, Santali, Konkani, Gujarati etc. More apathetic situation for languages that are not either a scheduled language (such as Bhili, Gondi, Khasi, Kinnauri, Ladakhi, Malto) or are just a mother tongue under other languages (such as Kacchi, Karmali, Bagri, Sambalpuri, Yerava, Dardi, Rajasthani, Chhattisgarhi and so on).
To enable a language to come to a level of competence, comparable to some extent with other languages, we have to develop several things, including: content at the foundational level, status planning and standardization, audio visual content, language enabled technology products, higher level educational materials and so on.
It is evident that task is uphill, and we need to work incessantly and at a very fast pace to make sure that each of these languages finds its new users (the younger generation of each of the language communities).
One way to put the tasks on a faster pace is to take the help of technology. However, technology, especially language technology, does not come in without investment in it. It requires data, active engagement of the language community, experts in the concerned language and active documentation of the expertise/research and documentation before the same can be realized. Remember, technology is not pure science. It is an amalgamation of science with art and humanities. To give technology a human face, the real human beings, the users, need to get involved in developing such technologies.
Both the school and higher education departments of the Ministry of Education, Government of India, have come together to organize a two-day summit to brainstorm the ideas on how to quickly achieve these goals to promote all Indian languages. Titled as Technology and Bharatiya Bhasha Summit and scheduled to take place on 30 September and 1st October 2023 at DAIC, New Delhi, the summit is organized by the Central Institute of Indian Languages in collaboration with all the premiere Institutions of both the departments including the University Grants Commission (UGC), All India Council Technical Education (AICTE), National Education Technology Forum (NETC), Bharatiya Bhasha Samiti (BBS), National Council for Education, Research and Training (NCERT), National Council for Vocational Education and Training (NCVET) and National Council for Teacher Education (NCTE).
The event will include presentations, panel discussions, exhibitions, and opportunities to connect with like-minded people. Technical experts and Institutions working in technology FOR, IN and THROUGH Bharatiya languages, AI and ML researchers, Edu-tech companies, startups, users and policy makers of such technology will participate in the summit. It will facilitate the exchange of ideas and collaboration among attendees, and promote the advancement of language technology, research and innovation in Bharat and the world.  Interested stakeholders and participants can submit their participation and presentation requests on the Summit website at https://technology-bharatiyabhasha.aicte-india.org/.
We hope that this summit will pave the way for new methods of development and promotion of Indian languages will help language Institutions like the Central Institute of Indian Languages to expand its activities on a faster pace towards promotion of all Indian languages.