Reading materials for higher education in Indian languages is a dire need felt by students, faculty, and institutions across the country. Non-availability of such reading materials in Indian languages that can help students engage with modern ideas in their own languages and are relevant to their contexts is a major constraint in expanding access to education and ensuring inclusion.

The availability of concepts and nuanced debates in regional languages would enable the exchange and development of ideas in diverse contexts. Access to foundational, conceptual materials that lay down the basic perspective and structure in regional languages, would also facilitate students to eventually contribute to the discourse in these and other languages. 

The generation of knowledge that is useful to the community and which the community is a part of can only be accomplished when regional languages are the medium of higher education. Though this need for producing materials and offering courses in higher education in regional languages has always been felt, not much headway has been made towards it. 

With this purpose in view, Azim Premji University initiated the translation of higher educational materials from English to regional languages, to make these openly and freely accessible to a larger set of students belonging to diverse socioeconomic backgrounds in India. 

This one-of-its-kind initiative was begun with the belief that the availability of quality materials in Indian languages will support students to engage more deeply and thoroughly with content, concepts and ideas currently available only in English. 

The translation efforts are currently being carried out in Hindi and Kannada with a view to build discourses in these Indian languages. The University is obtaining appropriate copyright permissions to increase the number of open access documents on the site.

Objectives

Anuvada Sampada, the Translations Repository, has been created with the following objectives:

• Make high-quality academic material in sciences, social science, humanities and languages available and accessible in Hindi and Kannada to all.
• Enable wider dissemination of academic materials in Hindi and Kannada.
• Enable university/​college students, academics and practitioners to mine, use, and reuse academic materials in Hindi and Kannada.
• Develop materials relevant for teacher-development efforts carried out by the Resource Persons of the Foundation, among others.
• Promote original writing, reading, deliberation and discourse in Hindi and Kannada and build a sustainable ecosystem for the same.

Resources in Hindi and Kannada languages

• Selected readings for postgraduate programmes in education and development, readings for undergraduate programmes in arts, sciences and diploma courses.
• Selected texts, including readings from journals, extracts or complete chapters of books, and in some cases, entire books of disciplines in these programmes.
• Articles from the publications of Azim Premji University that are focused on different aspects of school and teacher education. These include translated articles from Learning Curve, At Right Angles and iwonder. It also includes articles published in Pathshala Bheetar aur Baahar. 
• Research studies, seminar papers, readers, books, etc., published by the Azim Premji Foundation.
• Podcasts, short films, panel discussions, brief lectures and materials in other formats for higher education programmes.

Use of the Repository

The materials in the Repository would be useful for a diverse set of users in multiple ways. Some of these are:

• Students in colleges and universities across India who are proficient in Hindi or Kannada can access these materials that will widen their horizons of knowledge at no extra cost to them.
• Teachers, teacher educators can make use of the materials for their own development as well as for sharing with their students to support their learning.
• Members of non-governmental organisations working in education and development can access materials for use in their work.
• Other higher education institutions may use these to develop their course content, etc.