The Union Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) intends to compile a standard English medical dictionary that can be translated into 15 Indian languages to encourage students to study medicine in their mother tongue under the National Education Policy 2020.
The Department of Official Language (DoL) under the Ministry of Home Affairs has invited bids from publishers of international repute with at least a five-year presence in India for the compilation of a “Medical Shabd Sindhu” to “provide essential learning tool to the students in their native language.”
As per the bid document, in the first phase, the dictionary with at least 1,00,000 unique medical terms and explanatory words will also be translated into 15 Indian languages: Hindi, Telugu, Assamese, Gujarati, Kashmiri, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Odia, Punjabi, Tamil, Bengali, Manipuri, Mizo and Konkani. Subsequently, the selected dictionary will be translated into remaining Indian languages in a phased manner.
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Till 2022, the Commission for Scientific and Technical Terminology (CSTT) under the Ministry of Education, whose mandate is to translate technical terms to Hindi, had translated about 60,000 medical terms, The Hindu had reported in November 2022.
