Union Human Resource Development minister Smite Irani slammed the opposition parties for dubbing every initiative taken by his ministry as saffronisation of education and the culture.
"Every initiative for the reforms and improvements in the field of education from the primary to the university level is dubbed as saffronisation by the opposition, but they accept it after it gets appreciation at the global level’’, said smriti Irani here on Wednesday. She was here in connection with the launch of multi lingual education portal - 'Bharatvani' at the Babasaheb Bhimrao Ambedkar University (BBAU).
She said there were over 40 crore Hindi speaking people in the world but to the share of the digital content in Hindi was only one percent. She said for increasing the share of Hindi and the use of the language in the digital world her ministry has given a `digital push’ by launching the portal. She said presently the content in the Bharatwani portal will be available in 22 languages which will be increased to 100 languages in due course.
The portal, Bharatvani a part of Prime Minister Narendra Modi's Digital India initiative, will have various education streams and will be available online in 22 Indian languages. later on, after the project takes off
successfully, subject matter will be offered in up to "100 languages". There is also an effort to develop dictionaries to bridge the gap between Hindi and 30 tribal languages in the country.Bharatvani will be an online encyclopaedia consisting of information on various subjects in 22 languages.
The portal, meant for students, will offer subject material in a range of courses varying from agriculture to economics to sciences. The idea behind Bharatvani is to help students, whose first language is not English,
access education and reference material online easily and for free of cost. UGC has also asked all universities and colleges of the country to share digitised and non-digitised material in various languages available with them for the ambitious ‘Bharatvani’ project.
An UGC directive said that 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.