Top priority language localisation to bring government services closer to the people: Secretary MeitY

The government of India is making all efforts to bring services closer to the people inclusively and create a window of opportunity for start-ups and young entrepreneurs. This was stated by Secretary, Ministry of Electronics & IT (Meity), Ajay Prakash Sawhney, at an interactive session on’ Language Localisation& CRM Services on GeM’, organised by FICCI and Gem here.

Secretary, MeitY, said that language localisation was the key to capitalize on the opportunities in open and transparent public procurement services of the GeM for vendors and buyers. Although there are many challenges which include speech recognition in various languages, translating speech to text and text to speech, optical and handwriting recognition. But all efforts are being made to ensure that a Malayalam and Bangla speaking vendor or buyer is able to have a dialogue in real time.

Radha Chauhan, CEO, GeM said that GeM was designed to make public procurement processes of the government transparent and it was imperative to have language localisation to make ‘Digital India’ a transformative movement. On Customer relationship management (CRM), Ms. Chauhan said that GeM was equipped to handle calls in 10 Indian languages which are transaction. The challenge to be overcome now is to create solutions in various languages for processing of services like public procurement bidding.

Arvind Gupta,CEO, MyGovsaid that 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.