Bhubaneswar: Prime Minister Narendra Modi in his 'Mann Ki Baat' programme today praised Ramjit Tudu of Odisha's Mayurbhanj district for creating a digital platform in Santali language.

"Ramjit Tudu, a resident of Mayurbhanj in Odisha, is running a campaign to create an online identity of the Santali language. Ramjit has prepared a digital platform where literature related to the Santali language can be read and written in the Santali language," the PM said.

"A few years ago when Ramjit started using mobile phone, he was saddened by the fact that he could not send messages in his mother tongue. After that, he started exploring the possibilities of typing 'Ol Chiki', the script of the Santali language. With the help of some of his friends, he developed the technique of typing in 'Ol Chiki'. Today, due to his efforts, articles written in the Santali language are reaching millions of people," said Modi.

The 28-year-old language activist has been working for the past decade to digitise and promote his mother tongue.

Currently serving as an assistant revenue inspector under Jashipur tehsil, Mayurbhanj, Ramjit is also a tech enthusiast. He has been providing a global platform for Santali literary voices to express themselves online, connecting writers from across the world.

Ramjit's journey began in 2014 when he purchased his first Android phone and gained access to the internet. It was during this time that he realised the dearth of online resources available in Santali. He discovered several tools to type in Santali’s 'Ol Chiki' script, but they were not widely accessible due to limited device support.

To overcome this challenge, Ramjit, along with fellow language activists, launched Ol Chiki Tech on Facebook. The platform was designed to promote and share resources for typing in Santali.

As the platform gained traction, Ramjit began receiving requests for assistance from various regions. He started contributing to Wikipedia, conducting workshops to help people create Santali entries. In 2018, after a year of collaboration with contributors from India, Bangladesh, and Nepal, they successfully launched Santali Wikipedia, which now boasts over 11,000 articles on diverse topics.

Working with a developer namely Jnanaranjan Sahu, Ramjit helped create an Ol Chiki Unicode converter, making it easier to convert Santali text from ASCII and other legacy encodings into Unicode.

Ramjit is now focused on an open-source initiative aimed at developing language technologies for English-Santali. He is collecting handwritten Santali literature to support the development of Optical Character Recognition (OCR) tools, which extract text from scanned documents. Soon, he plans to collect audio data to drive speech-to-text technology innovations.