NEW DELHI, 24 October 2019: Mr Abhishek Singh, CEO, MyGov, Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) today said that most of the users of government’s largest citizen engagement platform, MyGov, are English and Hindi speakers and efforts are on to onboard content in other Indian languages to ensure engagement of citizens from across the country.
Speaking at the curtain raiser of ‘Bhashantara – The Symposium for Indian Languages Technology Industry’, organised by FICCI, Mr Singh said that MyGov has almost 10 million users and the majority of them are from Delhi, Uttar Pradesh and the Hindi-speaking areas.
“We conduct polls and surveys. We need to extend our reach beyond the Hindi-speaking areas, to ensure that our results are truly representative. The objective of MyGov is to involve all citizens for policy formulation. We did consultation for the National Education Policy and presently issues like Tariff related issues for Broadcasting & Cable Services and Consultation paper for auction of FM radio channels are being discussed,” he said, adding that MyGov intends to be more inclusive to be the true citizen engagement platform.
Mr Singh said that the government is working hard to expand the content on MyGov into multiple languages as suggestions for consultations must come from across the country and citizens may give feedback in their own languages.
“That is the priority for the government and MyGov, and that is the way to move forward. I am happy to see a large number of start-ups in this space, companies showing interest and the kind of content which is coming on the internet,” he added.
Mr S.K. Srivastava, Senior Director and Program Head, Technology Development for Indian Languages (TDIL), MeitY, GoI, highlighted the importance of technology for translation of content on the internet in Indian languages.
Mr Ambrish Bakaya, Co-chairman, ICT and Digital Economy Committee, FICCI, said that FICCI is working actively with multiple partners to help proliferate the use of Indian languages in the digital space. Vernacular content will add the next 500 million internet users in India, he added.
Mr Anandsagar Shiralkar, Founder and CEO, Vizitech Solutions, said that the big companies have started seeing the importance of attaining a global scale with local market appeal. He flagged the need for improving the Indian translation industry.
Mr Aman Jain, India Manager, Public Policy, Google, said that the industry needs to find ways to include Indic languages on the internet.
The run-up to ‘Bhashantara 2019’, which is scheduled to be held on November 18, FICCI is organising the ‘BhashaAnuvad – Translation Competition’ in which individuals above the age of 16 years can participate. The participants have been asked to translate 1,000-word articles in five Indian languages, namely Hindi, Marathi, Gujarati, Tamil and Bengali from English. The number of Indian languages will be expanded later.
