The Hon’ble Minister of Communications and Information Technology, Shri Pramod Mahajan, visited C-DAC on December 12, 1999 to chair its Governing Council Meeting. On the occasion, he unveiled C-DAC’s Vision for the New Millennium: “To emerge as the premier R&D institution for the design, development and deployment of world class IT solutions for economic and human advancement.” In his message to the members of C-DAC, Shri Mahajan observed “This I see as not merely a statement but a promise and an action agenda collectively prepared by all its members”.

He also expressed happiness that C-DAC had translated this vision into a mission statement reflecting its desire and the goal it wishes to achieve in the various activities in the area of IT in the decade of the coming millennium.

Also present was Shri P.V. Jayakrishnan, Secretary, Department of Information Technology, who applauded C-DAC’s “pioneering work in bringing India on the map of Supercomputing and also multilingual and multimedia technology, which are most relevant for diffusing IT to the masses”.

C-DAC hosted Geomatics 2000 the Annual Convention and Conference of the Indian Society of Geomatics (ISG), at Pune during Jan 21 and 22, 2000. The theme of the conference was ‘Geomatics in Electronic Governance’. The conference was inaugurated by Dr N. Seshagiri, Special Secretary and Director

General of the National Informatics Centre on January 21, 2000 at the IUCAA auditorium, Pune University Campus. Shri A. K. S. Gopalan, Director, Space Applications Centre, Ahmedabad delivered the Keynote address. A Geomatics exhibition was also organised on the occasion.

C-DAC will be installing the PARAM 10000 at twelve premier academic institutes in India. Supported by the Department of Information Technology, this effort is a bid to promote the use of parallel processing technology and build high-end manpower for such technologies amongst the leading academic institutes in India. These include the six Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs), two regional engineering colleges of Suratkal and Allahabad, Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bangalore and BITS Pilani, Ranchi and the University of Rourkee.

Expressing his views on C-DAC’s keen involvement with the education sector, R K Arora, Executive Director, C-DAC, said, “The Institute views this programme as one of developing greater synergy between its own efforts of building application software and those of pioneer education and research centres.”

C-DAC, launched its three Indian language publishing software, ISM Ver 3.0, Shaili and Pratibimb.

ISM Ver 3.0, which consists of ISM Publisher, ISM Soft and ISM Office, is a 32-bit Indian language interface, which allows computer users to work on any Indian language with applications such as MS-Office, PageMaker, CorelDraw, Photoshop, QuarkExpress and Adobe Illustrator.

Shaili, comprises a collection of as many as 800 decorative designs in eight categories such as Arches, Borders, Motifs, Tiles, Corners, Frames, Web Components and Web Borders. The designs can be viewed in various application software tools such as A1, CDR and 3Ds using the browser provided along with Shaili.

Pratibimb is a CD title, comprising a collection of cliparts, designs, illustrations and photos from various cultures of India.

C-DAC has developed three banking solutions; Strategy Development - 2000 (SD-2000), Central Bank Data Mart and CyberPROFIT; for the financial and banking sector. These solutions are based on high performance computing and advanced software technologies.

A Rs. 3.5-crore contract from Man-Drapeau Research Pte. Ltd, (MDR), Singapore, for the SD- 2000 project, which involved developing a total solution to build a supercomputing-based Decision Support System (DSS), encoding and executing trading strategy for maximising returns and minimising risk was executed by C-DAC recently.

‘IT Solutions for Rajbhasha’, a seminar to commemorate the golden jubilee year of Rajbhasha as the Official language of India was recently organised by C-DAC to provide an overview of the technologies available for implementing various important office applications in our Rajbhasha.

In his welcome address, R K Arora, said that DoL had made colossal efforts for the penetration of the Rajbhasha to the grass-root levels of society.

“Such seminars will provide the necessary impetus to these developments, which address the evolving needs of users, and give a new dimension to C-DAC’s efforts of popularizing IT in Indian languages,” he added.

C-DAC demonstrates its Hindi Language software at World Hindi Conference

The conference also suggested that Hindi be developed as a language friendly to computers and communications and to developments and education in science and technology. On this occasion, C-DAC demonstrated its successful Indian language software products.

This demonstration was in tune with the theme of the conference, “Hindi and the future generations,” since without this work by C-DAC, Hindi and other languages would have been lost to them. This software eliminates language barriers and brings the benefit of computers to the common man, not conversant with English. These languages can now be used for various applications on a wide range of platforms.

The then Hon’ble Minister of State for External Affairs Smt. Vasundhara Raje Scindia inaugurated the conference.