Prime
Minister's Message: Information
Technology has brought about the revolution
that has transformed commodities, people and
their relations. Our sages envisioned the world
as a Global Village: "Vasudhaiv Kutumbkam".
That vision is poised to become a reality as
communities and countries network and join
up. What we need is the right mindset to impel
us towards the state of "Sarve Bhavantu Sukhinah".
The opportunities that today
's knowledge economy offers enable us to make
the knowledge and innovation available far and
wide, without any barriers of nationality,
language, culture, caste and creed. IT with
such a humanitarian perspective will lead to a
society where peace and harmony obtain. I hope
that with the success of the Technology
Development for Indian Languages Mission
programme, India will emerge as a pioneering
hub of multilingual computing and provide
appropriate technology solutions for
overcoming linguistic and cultural barriers,
and thereby ensure knowledge for all.
A.B.
Vajpayee
29
July, 2003
Secretary (Deptt of Official Languages):
He appreciated the efforts of DOE for making the output
of TDIL Programme available in public domain. He informed
that he is studying the various efforts made during the
last 50 years in this direction and is also interacting
with various Departments and Ministries at decision making
levels to make Hindi a popular means of communication
and exchange of ideas.He opined that the available aids
are still in a very preliminary stage, such as translation
aids. He desired that in the near future, tools would
be made available to human translators, which would substantially
improve the quality, speed and lead to language enrichment.
He also outlined a scope for application of IL tools in
Banking Sectors. He appreciated the efforts of TDIL and
hoped further impetus in future.
Secretary (Electronics) Message: National
excellence in the next millenium shall be determined by
the least common factor of human resource and the knowledge
base of the society concerned. Information Technology(IT)
has emerged as an enabling tool to reduce/close the knowledge
gap by facilitating acquisition, absorption and communication
of knowledge. In India where English literates are less
than 5%, there is also need to overcome language barriers.
For rapid economic develop- ment, national prioroities
ought to include 'knowledge for all' and 'moving up the
knowledge chain'. Under the national programme of TDIL
(Technology Development for Indian Languages), a number
of projects have been supported in the area of Indian
Language Processing Tools, Human Machine Interface Systems,
Translation Support Systems, Corpora and Lexical Resources.
There has to be a continuing effort , to tap global knowledge
to create local knowledge, to selectively place knowledge
in public domain for the benefit of people at large and
to improve effectiveness of communication. We also need
to motivate private sector through market incentives to
contribute to this critical area.
The website, http://vishwabharat.tdil.gov.in/ contains
information on Indian Language Technologies developed
so far and the fonts and basic software in public domain.
I hope this website will benefit people at large, researchers
and IT localisation solution providers and will keep growing
with collaborative ILT developments.
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