Community Spotlight: Meet Ashwani & Prasanta from Odisha (India)

Welcome to our Community Spotlight series, where we bring to you real stories from members of the global Crowdsource community.

Today, we are excited to shine a spotlight on Ashwani Murmu and Prasanta Hembram. Both lead the way for the Santali language amongst the largest tribes in the eastern states of India. Santali is one of the few tribal languages with a unique script.

Ashwani and Prasanta share a mentor-mentee relationship, the latter addressing the former as ‘Dada’ aka ‘big brother’. They have seen the inequalities prevalent and are devising ways to strengthen the foothold of their language in the digital space so that the next generation has a path laid out and an entity to call their own and can keep the flame alive for generations to come.

In this blog post, Ashwani and Prasanta share their personal journeys and experiences with Crowdsource, from accidental discovery of the platform to being digital activists for Santali.

Tell us a bit about yourself.

Ashwani: Professionally I’m a banker, but my passion has been the digitization of Santali language. I have also been involved with Santali e-magazine, Birmali. I started my language work with Odia and seeing the huge scope of promoting my mother tongue digitally, moved to Santali.

Prasanta: I currently reside in Odisha, working as a Botany lab demonstrator at a college. I spend my free time volunteering mostly in the field of languages. I am also an active contributor of Santali Wikipedia along with Crowdsource and other such platforms.

Tell us how your journey with Crowdsource began.

Ashwani: I have been contributing to Crowdsource in Odia since 2017. I heard about this platform from friends and since then have been a passive contributor. I became active after tasks in Santali were introduced on the platform and have been involved with a lot of outreach campaigns and events to raise awareness.

Prasanta: I have been a huge Google fan and have been using the search engine since school. But it was in college that I accidentally stumbled upon Crowdsource and figured out that I could contribute towards a language. I started with Hindi and then moved to Odia but that was more in a game mode and there was not as much seriousness in terms of working for a language. As we saw so many languages being contributed towards in the platform, a small dream started to grow in our minds to get Santali too into Crowdsource. We pursued the cause via Twitter and other platforms and at last on 29th Oct, 2020 Santali language got added to Crowdsource. It was like a dream come true for us all. Post that, from 2021-22 we started working towards contributing towards Santali via Crowdsource.

What does Crowdsource mean to you? What motivates you to be a Crowdsource influencer ?

Ashwani: Making a meaningful contribution towards our language is the greatest privilege for us. It’s like leaving a legacy for the next generation. What other motivation do we need?

Prasanta: As I have mentioned, I love Computer Science and my inquisitiveness has taken me to many platforms, but I have not seen any other platform like Crowdsource where you can access and contribute to 200+ languages in one portal. I have tried to estimate what it would take if we were to roll out such a portal. It's astounding the amount of capital, the manpower, the data-center strength we would need. Crowdsource is doing this for free. All we need to do is make language contributions in Santali. I have always wanted to do something digitally for our language and Crowdsource is perfect for that.

What makes your local community special?

Both: The government has designated us, the Santali people, a Scheduled Tribe status in certain eastern states. Santali has always been one of the most advanced tribal communities in India. Most tribal languages are oral and have no script. Santali is unique in having the Ol Chiki script and notable literary works.

We live very close to nature, and most of our festivals are dedicated to nature, like ᱵᱟᱦᱟ (Baha), ᱠᱟᱨᱟᱢ (Karam), ᱫᱟᱥᱟᱸᱭ (Dashain), ᱥᱟᱦᱨᱟᱭ (Sohrai), ᱥᱟᱠᱨᱟᱛ (Sakrat), etc.

Our communities are very tight knit and we work and gel well together. We have seen that when we conduct outreach programs, people rally around the cause very quickly. We are currently working in Odisha, but we would like to extend our programs to the Santali community across Asia as well.

What comes to your mind when you hear Quality Contribution (on Crowdsource)?

Ashwani: What we do while contributing, is teaching the machine. If the input is wrong, the output will be bad as well and we cannot utilize the same. When Santali first was inducted into Crowdsource, there was huge buzz in the community at large. Many people started contributing regardless of their knowledge. The result was a lot of mistakes and it took a lot of effort to edit and correct. We do realize that it will take time to streamline and get the quality to a level consistently.

Prasanta: I have seen this happen, people use other scripts to write Santali and this confuses the system leading to errors in machine learning. What we have realized over time is doing things small, but making sure the quality is good. So, we are currently focusing on students studying the language.

What is the one thing you’ll do this year to spread awareness about quality contribution in your local community?

Both: Due to covid most of our events have been online and we feel that the effectiveness of offline events cannot be matched. This year we will focus on more offline sessions in the same institutions where we’ve had online sessions, to reinforce the messaging.