Chennai (Tamil Nadu) [India], September 20 (ANI): Union Minister for Education and Skill Development and Entrepreneurship Dharmendra Pradhan on Monday stressed on the importance of education in one's mother tongue and said that the inclusion of the Tamil language in the National Education Policy would gradually gain support.

Chennai Apr 20 PTI Researchers at the Indian Institute of Technology Madras IIT-M were working with the National Health Mission of Tamil Nadu to improve health of newborns as health workers were facing a major challenge at primary health centres PHCs in rural areas of the State A project report SmartNRP neonatal resuscitation programme was released by the National Health Mission Tamil Nadu director Darez Ahamed recently to reduce the maternal mortality rate in the presence IIT-Madras director-professor V Kamakoti among others A team at the IIT-Madras Centre of Excellence on virtual reality identified skill training of the health workers as the major challenge the country was facing particularly at the PHCs Using virtual reality artificial intelligencemachine learning the SmartNRP tool will be used for training the workers at PHCs in Tamil Nadu under the National Health Mission This will be scaled subsequently to other States where NMR is very high IIT-Madras said in a press release If you look at infant mortality the biggest contributor is the neonatal mortality rate NMR which is death within 28 days of birth Around 40 babies are lost per every 1000 births We want to bring this down to single digit and all these initiatives are towards this direction Ahamed said IIT-Madras should also develop tools to train healthcare workers on various other areas such as treating accident victimsthere are numerous other areas that virtual reality can be utilised he said Kamakoti said I am sure virtual reality will make impact not only on healthcare verticals but in other areas as well There are a lot of very interesting ideas from IIT-Madras research scholars and students The projects were supported by corporate social responsibility initiatives of INdiaIdeascomBillDesk This support was crucial in developing the healthcare projects the release said PTI VIJ NVG NVG