In a remarkable development, the United Nations General Assembly on Friday adopted a resolution on multilingualism.
Calling multilingualism as a core value of the UN, India’s Permanent Representative to the United Nations, Ambassador TS Tirumurti said, ‘This year, for the first time, the resolution has a mention of Hindi language. The resolution also mentions Bangla and Urdu for the first time. We welcome these additions.”
It is pertinent to note that, since 2018, India, in partnership with the UN Department of Global Communications has been providing an extra-budgetary contribution to mainstream and consolidate news and multimedia content in Hindi. Recently, giving a major push to the initiative, India handed over a cheque of US$ 800,000 to the United Nations Department of Global Communications.
“As part of these efforts, the ‘Hindi @UN’ project was launched in 2018 with the objective of enhancing the public outreach of the United Nations in Hindi language, and to spread greater awareness about global issues among millions of Hindi-speaking people around the world,” Ambassador Tirumurti said.
Further reaffirming the need to achieve pull parity among the six official languages of the UN, Ambassador Tirumurti added, “It is imperative that multilingualism at the United Nations in a true sense is embraced and India will support the UN in achieving this objective.”
Along with India, representatives of several other countries too welcomed the resolution aimed at eliminating the disparity between the use of English and the five other official languages. It is important to note that Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian and Spanish are the six official languages of the UN.
Speaking of the decision, the representative of Bangladesh called on the international community and highlighted the need for joint collaboration to preserve languages around the world.
The resolution was adopted without a vote, and seeks to use all the official as well as non-official languages, including Hindi, in disseminating important communications and messages.
Further, it emphasized maintaining the United Nations websites in all the official languages. The resolution also requested ‘continued efforts to ensure the availability of staff training opportunities in the six official languages’.
India has been making consistent efforts to expand the use of Hindi at the United Nations. Notably, a UN News-Hindi audio bulletin (UN Radio) is also released every week.
Meanwhile, in other news, the United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres on Friday announced the appointment of India’s Amandeep Singh Gill as his Envoy on Technology. Gill, is currently working as the Chief Executive Officer of the International Digital Health and Artificial Intelligence Research Collaborative (I-DAIR) project, based at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies, Geneva.
