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Press Release

Language localisation being given top priority to bring govt. services closer to the people: Secretary MeitY

Oct 15, 2018


NEW DELHI, 15 October 2018. The government is going full steam ahead in combining the efforts of the Government e-Marketplace (GeM) and MyGov by giving primacy to localisation of languages. The effort is to bring government services closer to the people inclusively and create a window of opportunity for start-ups and young entrepreneurs.

This was stated here today by Mr Ajay Prakash Sawhney, Secretary, Ministry of Electronics & IT, Government of India, at an interactive session on 'Language Localisation & CRM Services on GeM', organised by FICCI and GeM.

Mr Sawhney said that language localisation was the key to capitalise on the opportunities in open and transparent public procurement services of the GeM for vendors and buyers. The challenges were galore - speech recognition in various languages, translating speech to text and text to speech, optical and handwriting recognition, etc. "Our dream is to ensure that a Malayalam and Bangla speaking vendor or buyer is able to have a dialogue in real time," he said.

Mr Arvind Gupta, CEO, MyGov, Ministry of Electronics & IT, Government of India  said from 'Digital India' to 'Digital Bharat', language content will play the most vital role. On the MyGov platform local language content gets consumed the best.

Ms Radha Chauhan CEO, GeM, Ministry of Commerce and Industry, said that GeM was designed to make public procurement processes of the government transparent and it was imperative to have language localisation in order to make 'Digital India' a transformative movement. As regards, CRM, she said that GeM was equipped to handle calls in 10 Indian languages which are transactional. The challenge to be overcome was to create solutions in various languages for processing of services such as public procurement bidding.

 

Ms Swaran Lata, Program Head and Director, TDIL, MeitY, said that there was an urgent need to connect to the last mile. TDIL has a language localisation project underway and this could be utilised by GeM to leverage data to localise public procurement content.

 

Mr Ambrish Bakaya, Co-Chair, FICCI ICT & Digital Economy Committee, said that India was witnessing a huge explosion of internet users. Today, over 450 million internet users had access to government and other content which made localisation extremely important. The next 500 million would be using the internet in the next few years. Therefore, both G2G and G2C services would have to optimise the use of local languages so that e-governance touches all.

 

Mr Suresh Kumar, Additional CEO, GeM, proposed a vote of thanks.

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