Setting new standards in legislative transparency, the IIITH, Punjabi University (PU) Patiala, and the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC) Noida, have digitised images of Punjab assembly debates dating back to 1947 and made them available online. The institutions have also created a search engine to enhance public accessibility. Not only that, the team has also made it inclusive with audiobooks. The search engine, developed under the guidance of CV Jawahar of IIITH, and Gurpreet Lehal, consultant at PU, is an initiative of the National Language Translation Mission, Bhashini. The institutions launched the project about two years ago. “Using Optical Character Recognition (OCR), we have converted scanned PDFs into searchable PDFs,” said Krishna Tulsyan, a research engineer from IIITH, who worked as team leader on the project. “Now, using the search engine, users can search for anything — not only in English, but also in regional languages — in these PDFs without even opening them.”

Three professors at the International Institute of Information Technology, Hyderabad have received research grants by the Anusandhan National Research Foundation (ANRF) to grow and foster a culture of research and innovation in the country. Prof. Chittaranjan Hens, Centre for Computational Natural Sciences and Bioinformatics, Prof. Karthik Vaidyanathan, Software Engineering Research Centre and Prof. Gowtham Kurri, Signal Processing and Communications Research Centre have been awarded the Prime Minister’s Early Career Research Grant initiated under the Anusandhan National Research Foundation which supports young researchers in initiating their research careers in a new institution with the help of a flexible budget and progressive initiatives for the ease of doing research. Each research grant which is meant for young researchers no older than 42 years of age provides up to 60 lakhs plus overheads for a period of 3 years.

A research team from IIITH led by Prof. P Krishna Reddy, in collaboration with scientists from Professor Jayashankar Telangana State Agricultural University (PJTSAU), has launched Version 2 of the Crop Darpan app, an AI-powered mobile tool designed to help farmers instantly diagnose crop health issues. Development of Crop Darpan is part of a joint research initiative between India and Japan under the India-Japan Joint Research Laboratory project. The initiative, titled ‘Data Science-based Farming Support System for Sustainable Crop Production under Climatic Change’, involves multiple institutes, including IITH, IITB, PJTSAU, and the University of Tokyo. Crop Darpan helps farmers detect issues in rice and cotton crops, including pest infestations, bacterial and fungal diseases, and nutrient deficiencies. The app not only diagnoses problems but also offers scientific guidance on corrective measures.