HRD ministry to launch 'Bharatvani' a web portal that will educate Indians in 22 languages
The HRD ministry will soon launch a web portal – Bharatvani which will contain various subjects from agriculture to economics to sciences in 22 Indian languages.
Replying to a debate in Rajya Sabha on the functioning of the functioning of her ministry, HRD minister Smriti Irani said work is also going on in dictionaries that bridge hindi with 30 tribal languages. She said that because of the Election Code of Conduct being in force, she could not launch the ‘Bharatvani’ in last month she had planned.
The minute the Code of Conduct is over, she said, she would launch this portal, which would have subject matter in 22 Indian languages this year and in 100 Indian languages next year. The Bharatvani language would help students, whose first language in not English, she said.
According to PTI reports, the ‘all-inclusive and interactive’ portal will be the largest internet language site in the world. In a letter to Vice Chancellors earlier this week, UGC Secretary Jaspal Singh Sandhu has asked all universities and colleges to share digitised and non-digitised material in various languages available with them for the ambitious ‘Bharatvani’ project.
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Sandhu in his letter to the VCs, dated November 24 said,
Bharatvani is a project with an objective of delivering knowledge in and about all languages in India using multimedia (ie text, audio, video, images) formats through a portal (website). This portal is proposed to be all inclusive, interactive, dynamic and moderated
The government is launching this project to accommodate and strengthen the oral tradition by disseminating and presenting the unwritten vernaculars, country’s classical literature in different languages, and to develop e-content and present the country’s linguistic diversity in cyberspace, Sandhu said in the letter. The UGC secretary said, according to the Census of India, 2001, there are 122 scheduled and non-scheduled languages and 234 mother tongues.