TDIL-MCIT,GoI – Technology Development for Indian Languages, Government of India

TDIL-MCIT,GoI Technology Development for Indian Languages, Government of India

 

http://tdil.mit.gov.in/news.htm

 

  Omvikas@mit.gov.in

http://tdil.mit.gov.in/apr_2005.htm

 

Transiting from catch-up to competitive phase ICT
is the enabling technology for productivity
enhancement and socioeconomic development.
There is sprawling digital divide between nations
basically due to non-affordability of IT appliances
and non-availability of requisite computing facility �
fonts and software tools � in local languages.
Conscious efforts are being made through UNESCO
in this direction. Certain nations have also initiated
their own programmes to develop information
processing tools and applications in their languages.
India has taken a major initiative towards ensuring
ICT in local languages for rapid socio-economic
development and participation of people at large.
With this backdrop, the national mission on
�Technology Development for Indian Languages�
promoted development of basic information
processing tools and linguistic resources for Indian
languages through academic and government
supported R&D institutions spread over the country.
There are 22 officially recognized languages and 11
scripts in vogue in India. One script may be used for
more than one language. Hence, India is a unique
country with multilingual, multi-script environment.
Although with her talented manpower, India has
emerged as pioneer in Information Technology, with
the ability, to handle turnkey projects from abroad at
lower cost, higher accuracy and at faster pace.
However, purchasing power as compared to
developed nations such as USA is 1/15. In India
illiteracy persist at about 34.6% and literacy in
English is less than 5%. This necessitates support
for R&D in the focused areas to develop basic
information processing technologies and
consolidating and packaging them in user friendly
form and releasing them to the masses for free-use.
This will greatly promote people�s participation in
the process of using this technology and developing
innovative products and services.

 

Besides, the activities towards preparing for knowledge based
society would be through the projects such as cross
lingual information access, multilingual search,
voice-enabled query system, etc. Report on the
release of fonts and basic information processing
tools for Tamil and Hindi entails list of various tools
and linguistic resources being available for free use.
Similar releases will follow for other languages.
ELITEX-2005 showcased the multilingual products
and services under the theme �Grass root
applications using ICT�.

There is lot more in the open domain which needs to
be searched and integrated appropriately into user-friendly
tools/ products for free use in the multilingual environment.
UNESCO downloads covers the free downloadable software
on UNESCO website under different categories such as
Operating System, Digital Library, Development Tools,
Productivity Tools, Science, etc. Identification of such tools
and integrating them into user friendly products and services
for mass use in developing countries is desirable. Prof. R.K. Joshi,
highlights the issues about Font Designing and Font Technology
in the context of complex Indian scripts in great detail in the article
�Indian Language: Font Designing and Font Technology�. The
article on �Smart Fonts� discusses various issues related
to smart font such as what is Smart Fonts, what are different
smart font formats, what is Graphite, why was Graphite developed,
how is Graphite different from OpenType and other complex
script technologies? �LaTex� tool is a powerful macro-based
text formatter written by Donald Knuth, and is popular in the
scientific community. LaTeX is the de facto standard for the
communication and publication of scientific documents. This
is in open domain and can be used for multilingual publication.
The article on �Digital Library of India� describes various
activities like digitization of books, manuscripts, magazines,
journals, etc., and development of Digital Library tools like
Cross-lingual Information Access, Multilingual Crawler, Multimodal
Interface for physically challenged, Automatic search Indexing
tools, Multimodal authoring tools, Text summarization, Folk
songs search and retrieval techniques undertaken at different
centres like CDAC Kolkata, IGNCA Delhi, IIIT Hyderabad,
IIIT Allahabad is covered. Greenstone: a suite of software for
building and distributing fully-searchable, metadata-driven digital
library, digital library collections, and features of ABBYY FineReader 7.0
Professional Edition, optical character recognition (OCR) system,
with high-recognition accuracy and format retention facility are
also described. These basic technologies will enhance IT applications
in local languages and facilitate the country transit from catch-up
phase into competitive phase.

What is the status of FOURTEEN RCILTS-Resource Centre for Indian Language Technology Solutions FUNDED by TDIL?Can we get update on this please !!

Subject: What is the status of  FOURTEEN RCILTS-Resource Centre for Indian Language Technology Solutions FUNDED by TDIL ? Can we get update on this please !!
Date: 5/11/2005 9:15:34 PM Pacific Daylight Time
From: vmkumaraswamy@yahoo.com
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Hello TDIL TEAM at DIT

You all must know the progress made by these FOURTEEN RCILTS Centers. You all know that each one of the Centeres got funded to the tune of 1 to 2 Crores. Some might be even more.

Conceived in the millennium year, The Resource Centre for Indian Language Technology Solutions, Indian Institute of Technology Guwahati, is one of fourteen such Centres, spread all over the country,  set up to provide information in various Indian Languages in Electronic form and make them available in native languages aiding the dissemination of information to the larger masses.

Funded by The Ministry of Communications & Information Technology, Government of India, this Centre concentrates on hosting information in Assamese and Manipuri, the official languages of the North-East Indian states of Assam and Manipur.

List of Resources Centres

Resource Centre
Languages Associated With

Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur
Hindi, Nepali

Indian Institute of Technology, Mumbai
Marathi, Konkani

Indian Institute of Technology, Guwahati
Assamese, Manipuri

Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore
Kannada, Sanskrit (Cognitive Models)

Indian Statistical Institute, Calcutta
Bengali

Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi
Foreign Languages (Japanese, Chinese) & Sanskrit (Language Learning Systems)

University of Hyderabad, Hyderabad
Telugu

Anna University, Chennai
Tamil

MS University, Baroda
Gujarati

Utkal University, Orissa
Oriya

Thapar Institute of Engg. & Tech., Patiala
Punjabi

ER & DCI, Trivandrum
Malayalam

CDAC, Pune
Urdu, Sindhi, Kashmiri
___________________________________________________________

We would like to find out what are the positive things that are developed by these FOURTEEN centers in different languages that are being used by people of INDIA.

Did these centeres solve the problems of Localisation of Languages in INDIA ? What was the General Direction given to these centeres when money was FUNDED to these centeres ?

Does the DIT has any signed documents o these FOURTEEN Centeres ? If YES, Can we have a copy of that please.

I hope I get reply for my questions about RCILTS.

Thanks
Sincerely

V. M. Kumaraswamy
____