Tamil Nadu allocates Rs 139 crore for Tamil development, digitisation

Indian Opinion Analysis

The allocation comes as the Tamil Nadu government continues to build digital infrastructure for classical languages, a domain where the Centre's Bharatiya Bhasha Samiti has also started work. The 1.55-million-term Sorkuvai portal is aimed at standardising Tamil in science and administration, a task complicated by the absence of a single official technical lexicon for the language. Rules under the Tamil Nadu Official Language Act require government offices and commercial establishments to use Tamil in signage and correspondence, but compliance has been uneven, particularly in corporate and IT sectors. The digitisation of palm-leaf manuscripts, estimated to number in the lakhs across private and institutional collections, has been attempted before but stalled over funding and technical standards. The next milestone to watch is whether the planned digital database becomes publicly accessible in this financial year, which would be a first for any Indian classical language.