BHUBANESWAR: Language is the identity of the society at large and community in particular, believes Ramjit Tudu. The 28-year-old language activist of Mayurbhanj has been digitising his mother tongue Santali and giving it an online identity since the last one decade.
Ramjit, a techie who is currently working as assistant revenue inspector under Jashipur tehsil of Mayurbhanj district, has also been providing Santali literary voices from across the world a digital platform to express themselves.
It all started in 2014 when he got his first Android phone which opened his access to the internet. “While exploring online, I found abundant information in major languages but very little in my mother tongue, Santali. This lack of resources sparked my curiosity to find ways to type in and promote my language. After some research, I discovered a few tools, but they had not yet reached the community because the Santali script, known as Ol Chiki, was not widely supported on devices at that time,” said Ramjit.
To address the issue, he launched Ol Chiki Tech - a platform on Facebook with two other language activists R Ashwani Banjan Murmu and Bapi Murmu - to promote and share these tools. He also engaged in outreach programmes and writers’ conferences, helping people to install these tools and guiding them on how to type in Santali. “Till date, we continue to update our tools and resources regularly to ensure public access,” said Ramjit.
As Ol Chiki Tech gained popularity, he received numerous requests for assistance from across different regions. He also started contributing to Wikipedia and conducted workshops to guide people in creating entries in Santali. After a year of collaboration with contributors from India, Bangladesh and Nepal, they successfully launched the Santali Wikipedia in 2018. Together, they have contributed over 11,000 articles in Santali language on various topics.
Subsequently, he joined O Foundation (OFDN), which works towards promoting indigenous languages by encouraging volunteer-led digital activism for languages. Here, he collaborated with a developer Jnanaranjan Sahu to create an Ol Chiki Unicode converter. With it, Santali language text typed in Ol Chiki using ASCII (a standard character set for computers and electronic devices) and other legacy encoding systems can now be converted to Unicode so that the text can be used universally, online content can be easily searchable and users can reuse content with ease.
That is not all. With very little Santali literature available on the web for people of the community to read online, Ramjit founded and designed ‘Birmali’ (www.birmali.com), the first literary e-magazine in Santali language four years back. Helping him in the initiative were Ashwani and another language activist Fagu Baskey. “This magazine is aimed at giving a platform to Santali writers to publish their works online for a wider reach. A majority of the articles in this magazine are written by experienced writers but now, we are also encouraging young writers to contribute,” he said. So far, the magazine has over 3,000 articles written by Santali people across age groups.
The technocrat is now working on an open-source data collection initiative that is focused on empowering language technologies for English-Santali. He is collecting handwritten literature for OCR tool development and Ramjit would soon begin collecting audio data to drive speech-to-text innovations. OCR is an advanced technology used to extract text from different types of scanned documents such as images or PDF files.