CHENNAI: People coming together by language could not be divided on the basis of caste and religion, Chief Minister M K Stalin said, while launching the ‘Tamil Parapurai Kazhgam’ (Tamil Propagation Organisation) that aims at taking the language to Tamil people living all over the world through online classes and a slew of digital teaching devices.
‘Tamil is not just a language, it is our life,' Stalin said, adding that the time had come to propagate the language and help Tamil people living in other countries master the language as many of them had forgotten to read and speak in their mother tongue.
Through the new propagation organization, Tamil people, living in large numbers in 30 countries and in small numbers in 60 countries, would be able to learn the language from the basic level to the advanced level as text books had already been made in 24 languages.
The teaching programme would be implemented through the information centres in all the countries and the 17 new information centres had come up in the last one year alone though it stood at 25 in the past five years, Stalin said.
Other efforts made by the organisation include digitising Tamil books, developing audio books, video lessons and flash cards to enable people learn Tamil words and devising teaching models based on listening, speaking, reading and writing.
The initiative to launch the organization that would stand by the Tamil language and help taking it all over the world was just a natural progression of the DMK’s measures to develop the language, Stalin and added the list of measures taken over the years starting from naming the State as ‘Tamil Nadu’ by the party founder C N Annadurai.
Tamil teachers, leaders of overseas Tamil organisations and students from all over the world joined the meeting online, the Chief Minister said and listed out his government’s varied contributions so far in promoting Tamil language that included the allocation of Rs 82 crore in the State budget for 2022-23.
Recalling the various steps taken by M Karunanidhi to promote Tamil, he said the Tidel Park in Chennai stood as a testimony of his efforts in promoting information technology development in the State when he was Chief Minister in 1996.
It was Karunanidhi who announced the organization of Tamilnet99, an online conference in Tamil, in 1999 to initiate steps on Tamil online education. Similarly, several people had over the years done their might to protect Tamil and now was the time to propagate it and hence the setting up of the organization as a crowning glory of all the historic measures of the past, Stalin said.
DMK and Tamil had been synonymous since the beginning and in the context of the formation of the new organization, digital Tamil associations had been formed in 200 colleges and a software for mathematical Tamil had been developed, he added.
