On Wednesday, AICTE- All India Council for Technical Education said it acknowledges the UDAAN project of IIT Bombay for the technical book writing scheme.

IIT Bombay's UDAAN project, led by ITB professor Ganesh Ramakrishnan aims to offer a novel end-to-end machine translation framework that involves extensive use of linguistic resources and a post-editing platform.

In a statement, the AICTE said UDAAN Team helped enormously in speeding up the procedure of translation of technical books. The strong foundation of their data-efficient machine learning measures organised at decile.org synchronise and supports this platform.

The council said the project is based on continuous research work resulting in more rapid turn-around time for fixing errors and fine-tuning the translation models in a low-resource setting.

It added IIT Bombay is openly trying to elevate and upkeep the UDAAN platform based on valuable inputs from AICTE, coordinators, and translators or reviewers for translation work of technical textbooks into diverse Indian regional languages.

AICTE has committed a budget of Rs 18.6 crores for creating the second-year course material in English language and its translation into 12 Indian languages. In September 2021, the AICTE disclosed that 226 authors reviewed and translated 218 engineering books for first-year UG and diploma programmes students.

Last month, UGC chairman M Jagadesh Kumar introduced the Engineering Book Discussion calendar under the National Education Policy (NEP 2020)s vision to make technical education accessible in diverse Indian languages. The first series of discussions commenced on November 29 and will go on till January 31, 2023.