Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Thursday emphasised the need to translate global research journals into Indian languages and digitisation of higher education.

Modi interacted with the heads of centrally funded technical institutions (CFTIs) through videoconference in the presence of new education minister Dharmendra Pradhan, a media release issued by the Press Information Bureau (PIB) said.

“The PM added that we need to develop an ecosystem of technological education in Indian languages and translate global journals into regional languages,” the release said.

Several institution heads and experts, however, later raised concerns such as possible poor quality of translations, the massive scale of the task and lack of experts.

“About 10 million papers in technical subjects get published every year. Translating them into Indian languages is a very big challenge,” a CFTI head who attended the meeting told The Telegraph.

“In India, there is no single language. Do we have experts to get global journals translated into different languages?” he asked.

He said that if research papers were also written in vernacular languages, there would be problems in getting them published as most reputed journals were in English.

AICTE chairperson Anil Sahasrabudhe, however, said translating journals was very much possible as the council had developed an artificial intelligence-based tool for the purpose.

“We have already developed an automated AI tool to translate content in English to Indian languages. It is giving us 80 to 85 per cent success. So, some subject experts are required to do corrections using another tool. We are using the AI tool for translating some of the online courses available on the Swayam portal of the government,” Sahasrabudhe said.

“After this tool is further improved, it will have the potential to translate any kind of technical material, including technical journals,” he said.

At the online meeting, the Prime Minister advocated online education to increase the gross enrolment ratio (GER), the percentage of youths in the 18-23 age group registered with higher educational institutions.

“The Prime Minister appreciated the improvement in the GER in higher education over the past few years and emphasised that digitisation of higher education can play a big role in increasing GER, and students will have easier access to good quality and affordable education. The Prime Minister also lauded the various initiatives taken by the institutions to increase digitisation, such as that of online bachelor and master degree programmes,” the PIB release said.