Chennai: Refuting the opposition charge that the Centre’s National Digital Library project has sidelined the southern languages especially Tamil, Tamil culture minister K. Pandiarajan said the Central government’s pilot project aims at including all the Indian languages including Tamil.
The National Digital Library initiative, the minister said, was aimed at integrating all Indian digital libraries and provide a portal for it, thus facilitating learning process. “Amma’s (late Chief Minister Jayalalithaa’s) government will not accept sidelining of Tamil,” Mr Pandiarajan asserted and added that he had already taken up the issue with the human resource development ministry and the content in other Indian and foreign languages, including Tamil, would be added shortly.
According to the minister the confusion was because of viewing the featuring only in English, Hindi and Sanskrit in the portal. He had written to Union HRD minister Prakash Javadekar on the subject and very soon, the ministry would feature the user-interface in eight Indian languages - Tamil, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam and Sanskrit and foreign languages including English, Swedish, Italian and German.
School education minister K. A. Sengottaiyan said arrangements have been made to set up a digital library featuring 10,000 titles available in the Connemara library here.
Earlier, raising the issue, DMK working president M. K. Stalin alleged that Tamil and other south Indian languages have been sidelined in the national digital library portal. “Only English, Hindi and Sanskrit are featured in the portal. This amounts to nurturing a north-south divide,” he claimed.
