Earlier this year, Honourable Prime Minister Narendra Modi decided that the PMO website , www.pmindia.gov.in should be made multilingual in order to effectively highlight various initiatives of the government.
Previously it was available only in English and Hindi. In May 2016, Minister of External Affairs, Sushma Swaraj launched 6 language versions of PMO
India’s website viz. in six major regional languages, including Gujarati, Marathi, Malayalam and Bengali. Sushma also announced that government will launch the PM’s official website in other regional languages also in a phased manner.
If checked the recent updates, there are Kannada, Oriya, Punjabi, Tamil and Telugu also in the language drop down.
Right after the NDA government regained power in 2014, the PMO is seen to be doing away with many issues related to minority community.
The present RSS-backed government is known to be staunch and hardliner, if one goes by general belief.
According to the census 2001, Urdu is the sixth most spoken language of India. Urdu speakers, mostly Muslims constitute 5.01% of the population, surpass those speaking Gujarati, Kannada, Malayalam, Oriya and Punjabi languages.
Now the questions that arise in mind are; Is it deliberate to ignore Urdu? Does the central government want Urdu speakers to be barred from benefits of government resolutions and schemes and official information etc?
If we look for a possible logical reason of this delay, we fail to find one but a deliberate act of injustice. Because, in a phased and planned development, one usually tends to give priority by looking at statistics. And, going by the sheer number of Urdu speakers, Urdu ought to have found a place on PMO’s website.
In the democratic land of India, let’s all just hope that people in power refrain from targeting few of their own citizens.
Editor’s note: Janta Ka Reporter made several attempts to contact the PMO for their reaction on the above story, but they remained unavailable for comments. We will update the blog as and when we get a reaction from the PMO.
Courtesy: Janta Ka Reporter