Download - Российский комитет Программы ЮНЕСКО ...

member states by emphasizing the need to safeguard plurality of languages and
cultures as the intangible Heritage of Humanity.
Cyberspace provides a unique opportunity to procure information about
everything. India which possess a large quantity of English-speaking and
technical human resources, can utilize and implement information technologies
in all fields of life. Today India is one of the biggest software services providers
and software developers in the world.
UNESCO Recommendations concerning the Promotion of Multilingualism
clearly enunciates that “… linguistic diversity in the global information
networks and universal access to information in cyberspace are at the core of
contemporary debates and can be a determining factor in the development of
knowledge-based society”. It also underlines that “basic education and literacy
are prerequisites for universal access to cyberspace”.
Recently India has enacted the Right to Information Act (2005) and the
Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education Act (2009). Now it is
contemplating with the idea to encompass preprimary education also in these
acts. Government of India is spending huge amount of money through Rajeev
Sarwa Siksha Abhiyan (“Education for All” programme) on primary education
and literacy. To give free access to information on all Acts, Bills, Decisions of
various committees, Judgments, etc, the government made it mandatory to
make them available on the Net. The information that is not available on the
Net shall be provided to citizens with 5 days of applying for such information.
India is not only a multilingual and multicultural, but also a multiscript
country. The 22 official languages are written in 10 different scripts. Hence,
it is a real challenge for specialists to design tools for information processing
in local languages at low cost to bring ‘Digital Unity’ and to make ‘knowledge
available for all’.
To build knowledge societies, it is essential to store, to transfer and to transmit
that knowledge in a multilingual form and make it easily and freely accessible to
people. This enables to build inclusive knowledge society with rapid economic
growth. It seems government of India is totally convinced with this fact and
initiated accordingly large number of measures to implement it (Vikas Om,
2001; Report by India to UNESCO, 2007).
Department of Information Technology of the Government of India initiated
a major program called Technology Development of Indian Languages
(TDIL) with the objective to develop tools for Machine Translation in Indian
languages, for language studies and research, e-governance, e-learning, etc. for
a group of major Indian languages. This job was entrusted to thirteen resource
104