New Delhi, September 04, 2009: Union Minister for Communications & Information Technology A Raja will be releasing free Software Tools and Fonts CDs on Manipuri and other five Indian languages namely Bangla, Kashmiri, Konkani, Santhali & Sindhi language on September 8 at 11 am at the auditorium of the Indian Habitat Centre, Lodhi Road here.

Union Minister of State for Communications and Information Technology Sachin Pilot and the Patron of the Society for Natural Language Technology Research (SNLTR) and Minister-in-charge Department of Information Technology, Government of West Bengal Dr Debesh Das will be guests of honour in the function.

Ministry of Communications and Information Technology had communicated the Manipur Bhawan, New Delhi to submit a list of 10 State Government employees who speak Manipuri for attending the function.

The technology experts of the Ministry will demonstrate the operation of the language software tools and fonts to the state government employees concerned.

Sources from the Ministry said that with the help of the software, a person speaking one language would be able to converse with a person knowing another language.

India is a multilingual country with as many as 22 scheduled languages and computer technology breaks the language barrier and bridges the gap between the various sections of the society through easier access to information using their respective languages and hence language computing becomes central to the exchange of information across speakers of various languages, it added.

Technology Development for Indian Languages (TDIL) Programme initiated by the Department of Information Technology (DIT), Govt.India has the objective to develop information processing tools to facilitate human machine interaction in Indian languages and to develop technologies to access multi-lingual knowledge resources.

Department of Information Technology launched another major initiative called National Rollout Plan to aggregate these software tools and to make these available through a web based Indian Language Data Centre (ILDC).

This activity is being executed in close coordination with Centre for Development of Advance Computing (C-DAC), Graphics and Intelligence based Script Technology (GIST), Pune.

Further, the consolidated availability of linguistic resources and tools at one place will help researchers.

The availability of these software tools, fonts and resources in local languages at no cost is intended to motivate general public to use Information and Communication Technology tools and technology in their day to day work like Word Processing, Presentation preparation, Spread Sheets preparation, Web Page Surfing & Designing, Messaging etc in local languages.

These tools and fonts will be made available on website: www.ildc.in and www.ildc.gov.in for free downloads online by the net surfers.

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