Meghalaya Speaker Thomas Sangma today informed that the Assembly Secretariat has sought the help of agencies and experts to assist on the use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in House proceedings during the next Assembly session.
Speaking to media persons here, Sangma said that the Assembly Secretariat wanted to allow MLAs to speak in the local language and therefore the secretariat’s officials are looking at how AI can help with the translation.
Acknowledging that the local languages such as Garo and Khasi-Jaintia should be used in Assembly proceedings, Sangma said that expert agencies will be there to observe during the upcoming budget session starting from February 16 and try to come up with their suggestions on how AI could be used.
“Probably, in the next session we can expect AI to be used for translation from local languages to English. I am keen to introduce this so hopefully it will be done,” Sangma said.
The Speaker also added that the Assembly is yet to become 100 per cent paperless but the process has reached halfway through since most legislators have agreed to accept the notifications through online medium.
“We are ready to go paperless since we are in the process. We have reached more than 60-70 per cent mark,” Sangma said.
It may be mentioned that the Meghalaya Assembly has started the process of becoming paperless and the autumn session in September 2022 was carried out digitally by adopting the National e-Vidhan Application (NeVA).
NeVA is a Mission Mode Project under the Digital India programme and the Ministry of Parliamentary Affairs is the nodal ministry for its implementation in all the 31 States/UTs with legislatures.
NeVA aims to bring all legislatures of the country together, in one platform thereby creating a massive data depository and it provides paperless Assembly, a concept involving electronic means to facilitate the work of Assembly.
The funding of NeVA is through the Central Sponsored Scheme at 90:10 for North East & hilly States and 100 per cent for Union Territories.
