MHA completes mother tongue survey project across India with field videography of 576 mother tongues

New Delhi [India], November 8 : Centre has successfully completed its Mother Tongue Survey of India (MTSI) project with field videography of 576 languages and dialects across the country, Ministry of Home Affairs' (MHA) Annual Report 2021-2022 said.
Currently, the report mentions, the video-graphed speech data of Mother Tongues are going to be uploaded on National Informatics Centre (NIC) server for archiving purposes.
Organisations such as NIC and National Film Development Corporation (NFDC) are rendering their exemplary services in documenting and preserving the linguistic data of surveyed Mother Tongues in audio-video files, reads the report.
In order to preserve and analyze the original flavour of each "indigenous Mother Tongue", the report also states it has been planned to set up a webarchive at the National Informatics Centre (NIC).
"For this purpose, proper editing in arranging the linguistic data by the in-house linguists is under process," the report said.
Besides, the report said, the volume on Linguistic Survey of India (LSI) Jharkhand is finalized and LSI Himachal Pradesh is nearing completion. "However, the field work of LSI Tamil Nadu and Uttar Pradesh is going on."
The LSI is a regular research activity in ORG&CCI since the 6th five year plan.
Detailing about the upcoming census, which is still on hold since Covid-19 pandemic fear affected people across the country, several new initiatives have been taken for facilitating smooth conduct of the mega exercise, including use of the advanced geospatial technology.
The pre-census mapping activities include the preparation and updation of maps showing administrative units of the states and UTs, districts, sub-districts, villages, towns and wards within towns to ensure proper coverage of the entire geographical area of the country, it said.
Further, the report said, efforts are being made for dissemination of Census results through web based interactive maps. "Preparatory work in this direction has already been initiated."
Some of these initiatives include purchase of versions and re-modules of software for completing the Census mapping activities in a quick and efficient manner and all mapping manpower trained on using the latest software, the report said.
Jurisdictional changes that occurred in the country after Census 2011 till December 31, 2019 have been updated in the geo- referenced database and further updation is going on as the freezing date has been extended upto June 30, 2022.
More than six lakh maps (district, sub-district, village level) have been prepared and being uploaded in the in-house portal for census functionaries and the same will be further updated and finalised as per jurisdictional changes till June, 2022
For the first time, the House Listing Block (HLB) Mobile Mapping App for geo-referencing of all enumeration blocks of the coming census in the country has been introduced and necessary training on this has been imparted to national and master trainers.
Instructions manual on use of mapping app has been prepared in English, Hindi and regional languages, the report said.
The most important step after the enumeration exercise and data processing is the dissemination of the Census results for its use by Government Departments, Universities, Institutes of repute, scholars, students and other data users, it said.
With this objective, this office is implementing an elaborate data dissemination plan to keep the data users informed about the utility and releases of different datasets from Census, like population, SCs and STs, literates, workers and non-workers, slum data, age data and data on housing and household amenities and assets.