Maharashtra: Varsities told to step on it, translate at least 10 books in two weeks

The Commerce and Science faculties have been ordered to complete the translation on priority. Representation Pic

With state universities falling behind in the translation of course material into Marathi from English, Dr Shailendra Deolankar, the state director of higher education, has instructed them to quicken the pace and present at least 10 translated books within two weeks. The translation of the course material is to be done to meet the National Education Policy (NEP) 2020 guidelines. The task applies to Commerce and Science faculties across all non-agricultural state universities. The course material was to be translated before the current academic year. However, the work was delayed, prompting Deolankar to give a new deadline.

An urgent meeting was convened by Deolankar with the representatives of all non-agricultural universities after they failed to comply with an earlier directive, which gave universities three months to finish the translation. A circular in this regard has instructed universities to translate at least 10 books (course material) using the IIT Bombay's (IIT-B) software, ‘Udaan', by September 15.

According to Deolankar, the translation into Marathi will benefit students from across the state. With the NEP in mind, the University Grants Commission (UGC) aims to publish more than 1,500 books in Indian languages. Deolankar said, "A majority of the translation work should have been completed, but it was not. I was astonished to learn that the job was being done slowly. All course material, for the Commerce and Science faculty, was supposed to be translated by universities. However, this task is still incomplete. Therefore, a new deadline for the translation has been set and all universities are expected to complete the first phase of the task by mid-September."

Also read: Mumbai: ‘BMC targeting hawkers via anti-plastic drive'

Project Udaan

Professor Ganesh Ramakrishnan, Institute Chair Professor, Department of Computer Science and Engineering, IIT-B, and his team launched ‘Project Udaan' on September 14, 2021. A donation-based project, Project Udaan is an end-to-end ecosystem that translates scientific and technical content from English to Hindi and many other Indian languages. Initially, the AI-based translation ecosystem was able to help translate only engineering textbooks and learning materials in one-sixth of the time it would take for a team of domain and linguistic experts to work manually. Now the software is able to translate textbooks in all domains.