BHUBANESWAR: President of India Droupadi Murmu will launch 20 engineering books that have been translated into Odia at Jaydev Bhawan here on Friday. The Technical Education department in collaboration with the Institute of Odia Studies and Research has translated the books for the first year - nine for degree and 11 for diploma students. The All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE), in alignment with National Education Policy-2020, has initiated technical education in Indian languages for the year 2021-22 to ensure improved understanding and teaching-learning outcome.
The Council has introduced ‘AICTE Technical Book Writing and Translation’ in 12 scheduled Indian languages including Odia. Member secretary of Institute of Odia Studies and Research Subrat Prusty informed that 64 language experts, translators and reviewers translated the first year books into Odia within eight months (February to August) this year. Odia is the third Indian language in which the engineering course material has been translated after Hindi and Tamil.
The task of translating the books was initially assigned to IIT-Kharagpur, IIT-Bhubaneswar and BPUT but the three institutions expressed their inability to do it. Following this, an MoU was signed between the department and Institute of Odia Studies and Research to implement the work. A project monitoring unit comprising senior faculty of Odisha’s popular universities- IIT, IIIT and NIT-R was formed which selected the 64 experts to translate the books into Odia.
“This is a four-year project where year-wise engineering books of both diploma and degree level will be translated into Odia. We have already started work on second year books under which 88 books - 46 of diploma and 42 of degree - will be translated. We are in the process of selecting translators. For the third year course too, 88 books will be translated,” Prusty said. A decision, however, is yet to be taken for the fourth year course.