Shaheer Ahmed
In accordance with Article 251 of the Constitution, the Ministry of Planning, Development, and Special Initiatives is now working to include Urdu on the roster of official languages used by the various branches of the government.
In light of this, it recently gave its approval to a revised project document for a project that will cost 78.186 million rupees and will be known as “Establishment of National Language Processing Laboratory (NLP-Lab),” with the goal of accelerating efforts to comply with an order issued by the Supreme Court in 2015 to establish Urdu as an official language.
The National Language Promotion Department (NLPD) will be in charge of the project’s implementation, although the Ministry of National Heritage and Culture Division will act as the project’s sponsoring agency.
Director General of the National Language Promotion Division (NLPD) Dr. Rashid Hameed stated that the project’s primary goal was to “raise Urdu to the status of languages with extensive digital data resources and equip it with modern technology applications.” The NLPD was founded in October 1979 with the mission of promoting and developing Urdu as the national language of Pakistan.
He thought that only languages that evolved alongside new technologies would succeed in the modern era.
The current administration has made significant progress in bringing about digital transformation in the country since taking office in April 2022.
Professor Ahsan Iqbal, the minister in charge of planning, has been a major driver behind these initiatives, which have mostly focused on automating formerly manual procedures.
