Five projects of IT&E dept bag SKOCH award

Kolkata: The state Information Technology and Electronics (IT&E) department has reasons to rejoice as five projects of the department have bagged SKOCH Order-of-Merit awards at the 52nd Skoch Summit in New Delhi, held from June 21 to 23.

Society for Natural Language Technology Research (SNLTR) project that deals with digital archive of Bengali Literature, CyberSecurityCoE, Electronic Braille Reading System, and Matir Kotha and Implementation of ICT at School project were awarded. All these projects are being implemented by West Bengal Electronics Industry Development Corporation Ltd

(WEBEL).

It may be mentioned that SNLTR, a society under IT department, is working on digitisation of prominent Benngali literary works, which are out of the protocol of copyright. As the process of digitisation follows an international encoding standard, it is easily accessible globally to the public on internet.

SNLTR has digitised the entire literary works of Rabindranath Tagore with swaralipi, complete works of Saratchandra Chattopadhyay, complete works of Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay, Swami Vivekananda Rachanabali, and cinema-script of Satyajit Ray's film Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne.

"The ongoing projects includes digitisation of Sukanto Rachana Samagro, Sree Ramakrishna Kathamrita, Nazrul Islam Rachana Samagro and Multidimensional Corpora of Bengali Speech," a senior official of WEBEL said.

In the cyber security category, Bengal is all poised to lead by example and has already set up a Cyber Security Centre of Excellence in New Town with the aim to explore new employment opportunities in the cyber security space amid growing demands for professionals and experts.

"WEBEL Mediatronics Ltd's Electronic Braille Reading System is being used by states like Jammu and Kashmir and Madhya Pradesh for imparting education to the blind students," the official said.

Matir Kotha project and Implementation of ICT at School scheme in Bengal both won the Gold Awards.

Aninda Chatterjee, managing director Webel along with some senior officials were present at the award function in the capital.