Making internet accessible in consumers’ language is our prime objective: Union Minister Rajeev Chandrasekhar
Author: BI Bureau
New Delhi: Union Minister of State for Electronics and Information Technology Rajeev Chandrasekhar has said that making the internet accessible, available and being able to contribute to the internet in India is on high priority with the government and “we want to achieve this in the short term.”
“After the Bharat Net project, the world’s largest rural broadband project, is rolled out, we are going to very soon have billion plus Indians who would be online accessing internet and availing public goods, services,” he said while addressing ‘Bhashantara – Indic Internet: The Foundation of Next Phase of Digital Transformation, organized by FICCI, jointly with MeitY.
Chandrasekhar said that our vision is not just connecting every Indian but making sure that the type and the nature of the internet that we experience are defined by open internet along with being safe and trusted. “It is in the area of making the internet available in the language of the Indian consumers’ choice that we are trailing behind. We need to have a real roadmap and we don’t want to mandate this.”
India, he said, is now determined to be the preeminent country in the world to use technology for its advancement, growth, empowering every Indian, improving governance on one hand while creating jobs and investment opportunities on the other hand. We also have to create deep capabilities around emerging areas of future technologies. “We want to use technology in a very deep, positive and accelerated manner to achieve these objectives. Technology and the internet cannot be anything but inclusive,” added Chandrasekhar.
The Minister further urged the industry to come forward in ensuring that search engines and emails should also be made available in multiple languages. “These are things that we must achieve in the short term, and it is easily doable. MeitY will be the enabler to these efforts, and it is very important for us to deliver this to the Indian users,” he noted.
Ajay Prakash Sawhney, Secretary, Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology, said that language options on the internet is a major step that will enable more people to use the platform in a much more effective way. “In the National Language Translation mission, we are in the process of drafting a similar National Public Digital platform. This will bring all data and resources that are available which can fuel the growth in technologies in and around Indian languages.”
Uday Shankar, President, FICCI, said that technology has a huge role to play, and NLP (National Language Processing) is a way for computers to understand, analyze and derive meaning from human languages. “The dream of an all-inclusive Digital India cannot be realized without bringing NLP research and application in India at par with that of languages like English,” he added.
Virat Bhatia, Chairman, FICCI ICT and Mobile Manufacturing Committee, said that the Indian language internet users are expected to grow and will account for nearly 75 per cent of India’s internet user base. The future lies in the uplifting of digital initiatives to national public digital platforms, which are simple and bring together existing systems, players and open the doors for innovation and value-added services roping in the public and private ecosystem players, he added.
Ashutosh Gupta, Country Manager, LinkedIn India, said: “We are completely supportive of the government’s strategic goal to make the internet multilingual and more accessible for different regions and communities – an effort that will go a long way in driving greater digital inclusion across the country. And it is at this exciting inflection point that we are launching Hindi language support on the platform to strengthen our vision to create economic opportunity for every member of the workforce and take down language barriers for Hindi speakers across the world.”
Aman Jain, Head, Government Affairs and Public Policy-India, Google, said that our commitment is towards enhancing the access and connectivity, especially in the rural areas. Dr Ajay Data, Co-Chair, ICT & Mobile Manufacturing Committee, FICCI and CEO and Founder, Data Xgen Technologies, said that while it is true that considerable progress has been made in developing digital content in local languages, the real challenge lies in providing a single platform to the vast arrays of stakeholders to come and work together. /BI/
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The exports of agricultural commodities from March to June 2020 shot up by 23.24 percent on-year to Rs 25,552.7 crores.
As the economy comes to a standstill amid the coronavirus-led lockdown, India’s agriculture sector has taken the baton of economic growth in its hands. The exports of agricultural commodities from March to June 2020 shot up by 23.24 percent on-year to Rs 25,552.7 crores, according to the Ministry of Agriculture & Farmers Welfare. The government said that self-reliant agriculture is critical for the goal of an Atmanirbhar Bharat and for this, agricultural export is extremely important as besides earning foreign exchange for the country, the exports help farmers, producers, and exporters to take advantage of the wider international market and increase their income.
The surge in exports has also resulted in increased production in the farm sector by increasing coverage area and productivity. The share of India’s agricultural exports and imports in the world agriculture trade in 2017 was 2.27 percent and 1.90 percent, respectively. Even during the difficult time of pandemic lockdown, India took care not to disturb the world food supply chain and continued to export, the government said.
Ministry of Agriculture has prepared a comprehensive action plan for the promotion of Agri trade; the twofold approach focuses on boosting Agri Export with emphasis on value addition and action plan for Import Substitution. Recently, the Agriculture sector has witnessed a series of reforms, giving more choices to the farmers to sell their produce at competitive rates.
To mention a few, the Export strategy focuses on the export promotion of fast-evolving niche markets of Wellness food/ Health-conscious food/nutraceuticals, Development of “Brand India” in campaign mode to help penetration into new foreign markets and of new products which automatically translates into higher value realization, Gulf countries have been identified as focus destination to increase the market share which is a strong market for India though presently India caters to only 10-12% share of their total imports. A product-market matrix has been made containing a list of products of strength that could be expanded in new geographies and a list of known markets which can be introduced with newer products.
At the behest of the Department of Agricultural Cooperation & Farmers’ Welfare, Ministry of Agriculture, product-specific Export Promotion Forums have been created to lead Agri exports to new heights. Each Export Promotion Forum shall be having exporters of the related commodity as its members along with official members representing concerned Ministries/Departments of the Central and State Governments. Chairman APEDA shall be the chairman of each of these forums. The forums will meet at least once every two months, to discuss recommendations on issues pertaining to the export.
The recommendations of the forum will be placed in the product committee / Authority of APEDA. The Forum will keep in close contact with the concerned organization of the Ministry of Agriculture such as MIDH, Extension, NPPO, etc., DGFT, Ministry of Civil Aviation, MoFPI, etc. to further the interest of agricultural export.
