Padakanaja to grow larger, more comprehensive

Padakanaja is an official mobile app of the Karnataka government, meant to ease the implementation of Kannada in administration and for public usage

Padakanaja, a collection of 79 comprehensive and authoritative dictionaries, both ‘Kannada to English’ and ‘English to Kannada’, of the Karnataka government, under e-Kannada Yojane (project), will soon be updated with more dictionaries. The Padakanaja is expected to expand soon.

"Padakanaja is available in both web portal (https://padakanaja.karnataka.gov.in/) and mobile application forms. The mobile app is available for android smartphones," said Beluru Sudarshan, advisor to the chief minister on e-governance.

“It is an official mobile app of the Karnataka government, in order to ease the implementation of Kannada in administration and for public usage. The app provides unified single window to access multiple lexical resources such as various departmental glossaries and dictionaries published by both government and private publishers,” Sudarshan said.

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H L Prabhakar, Project Director, Capacity Building and Kannada Computing, Centre for e-Governance (CeG), said that the first version of Padakanaja is available for users, while steps are being taken for the launch of its improved version.

“Technologies are being explored to make the app and portal more user-friendly. Text-to-voice software is being explored to provide the proper pronunciation of difficult words. A list of must-add dictionaries is being prepared,” he said.

M Pushpa, project manager, CeG, said, "At present, there is ‘meaning’ and ‘explanation’ of 2.03 lakh Kannada words and 79,006 English words on Padakanaja. Around 12 people have downloaded the app from the web portal, while over 1,000 users have downloaded through mobile playstore."

“Besides Padakanaja, Lipyantarana software for transliteration is a useful initiative of CeG. It helps one to read and study literature or texts of other languages, even if one does not know its script. Thus, one can read any Indian language in Kannada script. Similarly, others can read Kannada in their script. Except for transliteration of regional Indian languages in English script, almost all major Indian scripts can be used on this software,” she said.