NEW DELHI: The central government has directed senior officials to use simple, spoken Hindi for official correspondence, after a review revealed that most ministries were nowhere close to meeting the target of using the official language for three-fourths of file notings.Write all letters and orders in simple Hindi spoken in the usual course and use short sentences, says the directive, sent by secretary (official languages) Girish Shankar to senior officials, including secretaries in all central ministries.If need be, use the Google Voice Typing application to write in Hindi or refer to a five lakh-word strong online translation tool to be unveiled by the Centre soon, the directive says.This comes after a review meeting held with 20 ministries on January 8, chaired by Shankar, threw up the fact that while most ministries have shown that 100 per cent of staff can speak and understand Hindi, the use of the language for official correspondence is as low as 12 per cent in some cases.The government also frowned on the lack of bilingual websites of some ministries and sought to know why websites open in English by default and not in Hindi."Senior officials of the ministry should do communiqué in Hindi so that their juniors are also encouraged to do the same… the seniors should not be dependent on those officials who can write in Hindi," Shankar said at the meeting, as per the minutes accessed by ET.The Department of Official Language gave ministries a presentation on Google Voice Typing application, demonstrating how senior officials can use it to type in Hindi by speaking into a microphone in the language. Further, the Department of Electronics and Information Technology (Dei-TY) told the government that it is preparing a translation tool that will support five lakh English words and their Hindi translations.Before this meeting, on December 28 last year, Shankar wrote a letter to all ministries with a copy to the PMO, stressing on the "constitutional responsibility" of central officials to use Hindi in their daily work."We should use simple Hindi spoken in usual course, in our correspondence. Use small sentences. Hindi should not remain just a language of translation in government work – for this it is necessary that simple Hindi should be used at the top levels in the ministries," the letter said.The January 8 meeting showed that most ministries did not have bilingual websites. "The website, instead of opening in English, should have the option on the main webpage itself to open in Hindi or English. All central government websites should be bilingual," Shankar said, as per the minutes.The representative of the higher education department conceded at the meeting that the situation of work in Hindi in the department was not good, while the minority affairs ministry admitted that its correspondence in Hindi was also low and its website was not bilingual either.Only 60 of the 247 senior officials in the Department of Higher Education department were found doing more than 70 per cent of their official work in Hindi. While the Centre has fixed 75 per cent as the target for all file notings to be done in Hindi, the minority affairs ministry had achieved a target of just 12.42 per cent while the corporate affairs ministry fared only relatively better with 27.73 per cent and the coal ministry notched up 31 per cent.The Department of Agriculture and Co-Operation also admitted to low percentage of correspondence in Hindi, while the meeting also recorded dissatisfaction with the performance of the ministries of coal and food processing on this count.