The University Grants Commission has set a time frame of 6 to 12 months for the translation of undergraduate course textbooks into Indian languages. The announcement was made after a meeting of UGC officials with international publishers to discuss translation. According to The Hindu report, UGC Chairperson M. Jagadesh Kumar called an online meeting attended by representatives from leading publishers including Springer Nature, Wiley India, Taylor & Francis, Cengage India, and Cambridge University Press India.
In a conversation with the leading daily, the UGC chairperson said that they have established an apex committee responsible to make a clear plan for bringing out textbooks in Indian languages used in UG programmes such as B.A, B.Com, and B.Sc. He stated, “We intend to translate many textbooks into Indian languages in six to twelve months. Subsequently, we will also cover postgraduate programmes.” Representatives from the publishers have expressed their willingness to collaborate on this national mission, he added.
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The commission has briefed publishers that it would like to encourage Indian authors and academics to translate textbooks in regional languages. In addition, UGC has proposed that a model has to be jointly developed to offer textbooks in digital format at affordable prices.
The commission has offered assistance to publishers in the identification of textbooks, translation tools, and editing experts.
The course books are going to be translated into several local languages – Malayalam, Marathi, Telugu, Kannada, Gujarati, Odiya, Tamil, Bengali, Assamese, Punjabi, Hindi, and Urdu.
In the month of October, Home Minister Amit Shah introduced the first set of first-year M.B.B.S. books in Hindi in Madhya Pradesh. The minister released the Hindi versions of medical biochemistry, anatomy, and medical physiology subject textbooks. Furthermore, the All-India Council of Technical Education has published 270 first-year engineering textbooks in 12 regional languages.
The Bar Council of India has also set up a panel, at the request of UGC, to translate legal books into regional languages.
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