Arrangements are being made to ensure that the World Telugu conference this year will go beyond recital of poetry and focus on a variety of issues like developing Telugu internet and bringing the language on a par with English and other international languages.
The US-based Silicon Andhra Association has already put in strenuous efforts for this in coordination with Unicode, San Francisco, which is standardising net connectivity for various languages in the world, while the government enrolled itself as its permanent member and appointed a committee to oversee this delicate exercise.
“It’s still a long way before Telugu internet is available. Altogether a different pattern is to be followed to evolve the net connectivity for Telugu, a language which has intricate grammar, spellings, phonetics etc,” says Information Technology Minister Ponnala Lakshmaiah.
A formal resolution will be adopted at the conference to promote and develop Telugu, spoken by an estimated 11.5 crore people in the world, as a language used for ‘administration, teaching and communication’.
This will be addition to the traditional objectives like protecting its classical identity and bringing about unity among the Telugus as a whole.
According to R. V. Prasada Raju, Director, Culture, four committees -- coordination, executive, finance and organising -- are formed each headed by a Minister, for the conference for which the government has released a sum of Rs. 5 crore out of a Rs. 25 crore budget sanctioned.
Besides, 16 sub-committees are formed to handle various other jobs, some of them as unique as maintenance of a website already created (www.worldteluguconference.com) and publication of books. Delegates are being invited from 15-20 countries and from different states in India.
Avilala grounds at Tirupati has been selected as the venue of the conference.
