Communications and Information Technology

 INDIAN LANGUAGE COMPUTING

  • India is a multilingual country with 22 constitutionally recognized languages and 11 scripts.
  • Text to Speech (TTS) systems integrated with screen readers for 6 Indian Languagese. Hindi, Bengali, Marathi, Tamil, Telugu and Malayalam has been launched in public domain.
  • Monolingual Search Engines (Sandhan) for tourism domain for 5 Indian lanugages i.e Hindi, Bengali, Marathi, Tamil and Telugu languages have been released in public domain.
  • Optical Character Recognition System for 6 languages i.e. Bengali, Devanagari, Gurumukhi, Kannada, Malayalam and Telugu scripts has been made available in public domain.
  • English-Indian Languages (9 language pairs) and Indian Languages-Indian languages (8 language pairs) machine translation facility has been made available.

 RESEARCH & DEVELOPMENT AND INNOVATION IN ICTE

  • Research & Development and Innovation Framework have been released. This framework envisages initiatives to address various aspects in the R&D life cycle for creating R&D/Innovation environment to help/achieve objective to set up in National Information Technology Policy and National Electronics Policy of the Government.
  • A National Super Computing Mission proposal has been conceived jointly by Department of Science & Technology and Department of Electronics & Information Technology to address the requirements of Next Generation Supercomputing.
  • The GNU / Linux based indigenous Operating System with Indian languages support “Bharat Operating System Solutions (BOSS)” has been deployed in various e-governance and educational applications. Total BOSS installation has reached 1.5 million so far.
  • Establishment of 27 Incubation Centres and incubation of about 120 Start-up companies have been supported.
  • Technology Incubation and Development of Entrepreneurs (TIDE): Under the scheme, 27 institutions of higher learning have been supported to provide seed funding to the technology startup companies in the area of ICT&E. As a result 114 start-up companies have been incubated in these institutions.
  • Information Technology Research Academy (ITRA): ITRA is a national programme wherein the focus areas are chosen with societal relevance for nurturing research.
  • Nanotechnology Initiatives: R&D and Innovation Framework document created and released. Major projects initiated in the area of Nanoelectronics. These include:
  • Centre of Excellence in Nanoelectronics Phase II — at IISc and IIT Bombay.
  • A major Center on “NEMS and Nanophotonics” at IIT Madras.
  • A major Centre on “Non-silicon Nanoelectronics” at IIT Delhi.
  • A major Facility on “Cluster based MBE (Molecular Bean Epitaxy) tool for high performance devices” at IIT Kharagpur.
  • A Prototyping facility for MEMS & NEMS at IIT Bombay.
  • Open Source Software (FOSS) Promotion: National Resource Centre for Free & Open Source Software (NRCFOSS) has been set up for creating an eco-system for promotion of FOSS in the country. GNU/ Linux based Operating System distribution with Indian languages support “Bharat Operating System Solutions – BOSS” has been brought out in Desktop/EduBOSS as well as Server versions. BOSS support centres have been established across India for providing handholding technical support to users.
  • Microelectronics: On-going projects in the thrust areas of Microelectronics i.e. Analog Mixed Signal Designs, Micro-Electro-Mechanical systems (MEMS), VLSI testing etc were progressed. Design of Digital Programmable Hearing Aid (DPHA)—Application Specific Integrated Circuits (ASIC) completed. A Human Resource Development project entitled “Chip to System” is planned to be initiated in this Financial Year.