Mah govt to collaborate with CDAC to boost e-governance

In an effort to boost its e-governance initiative, the Maharashtra government will set up a Centre of Excellence for Marathi in technical collaboration with city-based Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (CDAC).

The proposed Centre will assist the Directorate of Information Technology (DIT) of the state government in international consortia and other standardisation bodies so that Marathi language gets its "rightful place" in national and international scenario, officials said, adding this activity will "ensure interoperability between most of the applications across various platforms."

The Centre will evolve guidelines for creation of knowledge repository of various resources available in Marathi such as dictionaries, e-books, audio and interactive books and assist DIT in development of Marathi lexicons and standardised dictionaries and terminologies that can be used for e-governance applications.

Scope of work proposed to be undertaken by the COE for Marathi will also include training to government employees, testing and benchmarking the products and services and applications.

The Memorandum of Understanding between C-DAC (Gist) and Maharashtra government’s DIT will be valid for a minimum of three years and can be extended further on mutually agreed terms, officials said.

Two members of the C-DAC team from Pune will be stationed at DIT, Mumbai and will be responsible for gathering IT related requirements for the state government and will also assist the developers for implementation of Marathi language tools, technologies and solutions.

CDAC will also deploy nine members for carrying out various activities envisaged under the COE in its Pune premises to provide a "backend support" to the team stationed at DIT in Mantralaya.

The Gist technology developed by CDAC have allowed Indian masses to use their mother tongues to communicate on the computer platform.