Project SWASTHA aims to eradicate fake news around the coronavirus outbreak in India

The coronavirus outbreak has created fear and panic among the populace as it has already infected over 2000 people and taken the lives of at least 56 in India while it's global tally has crossed the mark of over one million cases, with at least 53,000 fatalities. But what's spreading even faster than the deadly virus over the internet is fake news and misinformation related to COVID-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus. That's why the organization is putting extra resources towards limiting fake news circulation by offering information related to the virus and its a disease in other languages through project SWASTH ( an abbreviation of special Wikipedia Awareness scheme for the Healthcare affiliates).



Abhishek Suryawanshi. Founder and director of Wikipedia's project SWASTHA gave us a clear detail of how the initiative can help fight fake news spreading online and provide health information to the masses of India. The project was started last year with an aim to provide health information on Wikipedia on 10 different topics in 10 different languages of India. However, while the team was yet to kick off its operation in late November and early December, the coronavirus outbreak started emerging. This shifted the team's interest towards the pandemic entirely.

There will be people accessing the web in Hindi as compared to English by2021, as per the recent Google-KPMG survey. More and more people are already coming online. Initially, there were more consumers and now we have more content creators as well. So moving in two to three years ahead, I feel like the internet will be dominated by Indian languages and Indians.

So that's what would be a dream come true situation in upcoming years and India is very special because the internet is pretty new in most of the rural areas and more and more people are coming online.

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