(Image credit: Chris Hand)

Heres a language test for all of you: what do you call ‘business management’ in Hindi?

Okay, before you pull out all those English-to-Hindi dictionaries gathering dust in your ancestral bookshelf, just log on to Indian Institute of Management (IIM) Ahmedabads swanky new Hindi website that was launched on September 26. This was done on the occasion of the Hindi divas (Hindi Day), that falls on 14 September, as a part of the Hindi fortnight celebrations between 14-29 September.

Bilingual websites are a mandatory requirement for all government institutions under the ministry of HRD. So all the IIMs are required to have a bilingual website and most of them have beaten IIM-A to it. Officially though, the promotion and implementation of the official language (Hindi) is the responsibility of a central government body called the Department of Official Language. But when PaGaLGuY called up this department, they were not even aware of IIM-A’s initiative.

So we were curious. Who is the Hindi website of these management institutes for? Although IIM Ahmedabad’s press release says, It is expected that more people will have access to the information and activities of IIM-As programmes and activities, the question is, who will choose to refer to the Hindi website over the English one? Will aspiring students (who have to be proficient in English to appear for the Common Admission Test — CAT) read it? Will Hindi language journalists in interiors of India have it easier now? Or will any lay person wanting information go looking for the website in Hindi?

According to Ishita Solanki, IIM-As Manager Global Partnerships and Corporate Affairs, the website is aimed at anyone wanting to find out about an institute of national significance. Besides, she says, if the European schools have their website in their own language, then why not India? But in the European universities, the medium of instruction is the local language so naturally the website will only follow, unlike IIM-A which conducts its MBA programmes only in English. One of the reasons the website was conceived of, she added, is because the IIMs, though autonomous, are a government body and all government bodies should ideally have bilingual websites.

Harinder Kumar, the nodal officer for Right to Information Act and Technical Director at the Department of Official Language, had not seen IIM-As Hindi website, but was eager to have a look. We did not directly tell them to do this, he said. But we expect all government offices and government-funded offices to have a bilingual website. Besides, he added, now that Twitter is also available in Hindi and a few Australian and American universities are allowing students to take exams in Hindi, Indian institutes should also wake up to the need for it. But how will it help management students, whose medium of instruction and exams are in English? Apart from government offices, many private companies have also translated their websites to Hindi and ,” said Kumar.

A team of three translators and two website managers worked for about 100 days at a stretch to translate and upload 1,200 webpages on the IIM-As (English) website. IIM-As Hindi Officer, Mukesh Sharma, says that he and his team deliberately made the language easy to read, and preferred to use colloquial Hindi instead of a more formal one. For example, instead of replacing commonly understood words such as the Internet or website with their Hindi equivalents, they were kept in English. Also while using the phrase vyavasaik prabhav (career impact), they have kept the word career intact, as it is usually used in spoken Hindi as well. According to the document given to PaGaLGuY by the IIM-A website in-charge, the number of pageviews on the Hindi website in the last three days have been 136, 146 and 83 respectively. The website is updated everyday.

Most of the other IIMs also have Hindi versions of their website. IIM Bangalore had launched its partially Hindi website back in 2009 and does not expect the website to be viewed by aspirants at all, but more by the general public. Their Hindi website was a recipient of the Indira Gandhi Rajbhasha Award last year, given out by Department of Official Language to ministries and departments of the government who have excelled in translating or producing original work in Hindi. In spite of starting its Hindi website in 2009, in the last month it got dismal page views of just 96, compared to some 4000 pageviews of the institute’s English ‘About IIM-B’ page.

IIM Ranchi too launched its bilingual website one and a half month ago, though all it did was auto-translate the content to Hindi using Google Translate. Since that is error-prone, the institute has put a team of 7-8 people to work on the translation and will be coming up with the new bilingual website by next week. IIM Rohtak, which started operations in 2010, does not measure traffic on its Hindi language website because the numbers are too small. We have very less traffic on the Hindi website, so we have not measured it, informed Kamlesh Pal, systems manager at the institute. But it won’t be more than 0.5% of the total traffic on our website. As of now, this website too is a Google Translate job, but Pal says that there will be a team to translate the content when they launch their new website soon.

IIM Calcutta revamped its website in June this year, to look more contemporary and feature its Facebook and Twitter presence. This was done on the occasion of the ongoing golden jubilee celebrations of the institute. Now it has also got the go-ahead for translating the website into Hindi. We have got the permission to start work on the Hindi website, informed Alok Guin, the Public Relations Officer of the institute. But I cannot say by when it will be up and functional. IIM Rohtak and Lucknow also have Hindi versions of their website, but IIM Raipur, Trichi and Udaipur are yet to launch a bilingual website.

And in case youre still wondering, the Hindi for business management is vyavasaik prabandhan.

Editor’s Note: The article was modified keeping in view the additional information was learned after the publishing of the original article. As believed earlier, IIM Ahmedabad was not the first IIM to launch a Hindi website.