Centre’s Transgender ID Portal Now Available In Regional Languages

The Central government's online portal, the Transgender ID portal which facilitates ID cards for trans persons which were initially available in English is now available in regional languages from Saturday.

The Transgender ID portal is handled by the Union Social Justice and Empowerment Ministry. It works towards generating certificates of identity for transgender persons through the applications received on their website. According to a statement by an official, the website will now be available in 10 regional languages encouraging a better experience for the users.

The Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Act, 2019 guarantees a trans person the right to self-perceived gender identity and a certificate of that identity from the government. According to reports, the Department of Social Justice and Empowerment requested the Ministry on Thursday to avail the website in regional languages too.

At the time when the website was launched on November 25, 2020, it was only available in English. But now from Saturday, it will be available in the following languages -

• Bengali,
• Gujarati,
• Kannada,
• Malayalam,
• Marathi,
• Odia,
• Punjabi,
• Tamil,
• Telugu and
• Hindi.

Until Wednesday, the portal has issued certificates of identity to over  1,557 transgender applicants out of the 2,327 valid applications. 770 applications still hold the pending status.

From the total number of applications received, 1,125 applications were from the state of Andhra Pradesh and 696 were from Odisha. Madhya Pradesh has contributed to 246 applications on the portal whereas there 225 from Gujarat. Around 101 applications were from Puducherry.

The rest of the states had a low number of applications. Some were even in single digits. The states of Assam and Goa had only one application each. Further, there were only two applications from Rajasthan and Jammu & Kashmir each. While the states of Punjab and Chhattisgarh had three applications each.

An official on Thursday said that the application too would be available to be translated into regional languages however the process of integrating this information in the central database would take longer.