MHA to compile standard English medical dictionary to promote medical education in Indian languages

The Union Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) intends to compile a standard English medical dictionary that can be translated into 15 Indian languages to encourage students to study medicine in their mother tongue under the National Education Policy 2020.

The Department of Official Language (DoL) under the Ministry of Home Affairs has invited bids from publishers of international repute with at least a five-year presence in India for the compilation of a “Medical Shabd Sindhu” to “provide essential learning tool to the students in their native language.”

As per the bid document, in the first phase, the dictionary with at least 1,00,000 unique medical terms and explanatory words will also be translated into 15 Indian languages: Hindi, Telugu, Assamese, Gujarati, Kashmiri, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Odia, Punjabi, Tamil, Bengali, Manipuri, Mizo and Konkani. Subsequently, the selected dictionary will be translated into remaining Indian languages in a phased manner.

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Till 2022, the Commission for Scientific and Technical Terminology (CSTT) under the Ministry of Education, whose mandate is to translate technical terms to Hindi, had translated about 60,000 medical terms, The Hindu had reported in Nov., 2022.

That year, Madhya Pradesh became the first State in the country to provide MBBS (Bachelor of Medicine and Bachelor of Surgery) in Hindi language. In the first phase, transliterated books in three subjects — Anatomy, Medical Biochemistry and Physiology — were offered to students. The text was written in the Devanagiri script rather than actually translated into Hindi.

On June 6 2025, Union Home Minister Amit Shah launched the Bharatiya Bhasha Anubhag (Indian Languages Section) under the DOL to provide an organised platform to all Indian languages in the direction of “freeing the administration from the influence of foreign languages.”

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“The National Education Policy 2020 (NEP 2020) outlines the vision of India’s new education system. NEP 2020 envisages that school-level education, which forms the foundation of early childhood education, shall be preferably imparted in the mother tongue/local language (Hindi and other local languages). It also envisions higher education, including medical education, in the Indian languages and creating a knowledge base in 15 Indian languages. National Medical Commission (NMC) has also permitted Medical Education in 11 Indian Languages and likely to extend it to other popular Indian Languages in future. Therefore, there is a requirement to prepare standard medical dictionaries in Indian Languages,” the DoL’s Expression of Interest says.

The Request for information or Expression of Interest has been issued to identify publishers who would be willing to share resources (standard medical dictionary of international repute) to the DOL for translation into Hindi and 14 other Indian Languages into Hindi without cost and are willing to share the cost of translation as agreed upon.

The publisher shall have the joint responsibility of designing, developing and publishing “Medical Shabd Sindhu”.

“The job shall entail providing rights (Legal/Intellectual/Copy) to DOL in order to translate English dictionary into target languages without any condition,” DOL said.

The copyright, patent, etc. of the translated version will be the joint responsibility of the publishing agency and the DOL and they shall ensure making the book available at bookstores, libraries, and other institutions.

The market price of translated dictionaries/glossaries will be jointly decided by the publisher and the DOL. The terms of joint copyright, intellectual property rights (IPR), profit sharing and other relevant terms and conditions will be decided through a detailed Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) to be signed by both parties after the final selection of the publisher.