Vice President M Venkaiah Naidu Thursday said making information available in all Indian languages and dialects becomes extremely important in a country as diverse as India.
"Making information available in all Indian languages and dialects becomes extremely important in a country that is as diverse, complex and multi lingual as India.
Most of the Information available online is in English.
If we wish to educate and empower our citizens, it is mandatory that we remove the barriers which they face to access information and technology," he said at a programme organised by the University of Hyderabad here.
He was given a demonstration on 'Saara,' a language translation tool developed by the faculty of the varsity.
Noting that several major projects have been taken up in India over the last three decades to develop Machine Translation systems between various pairs of languages, he said moving from laboratory models to practically usable and deployable systems has not been easy.
According to him, many of the ancient languages are on the verge of decay because of decade's worth of stagnation, lack of innovation and failure to adapt and adopt new ideas and new vocabulary.
"Studies by experts estimate that almost 600 languages are on the verge of death and that more than 250 languages have died in the past 60 years.
When a language dies, it takes with it an entire culture system. We simply cannot let that happen. Protecting our cultural heritage, including languages is our constitutionally mandated duty," Naidu said.
He stressed the need for instruction in schools to happen in mother tongues as children should learn it well even while picking up other languages.
The Vice President released a book "India's Ocean Neighbourhood- Narendra Modis Strategy Initiatives" penned by SV Seshagiri Rao, Chancellor of Central University of Kerala in a different event.
Disclaimer: No Business Standard Journalist was involved in creation of this content
