NEW DELHI, March 23 (Xinhua) -- The Indian government Friday launched the country's first sign language dictionary, exclusively for the hearing and speech impaired people.

"The basic aim of developing the Indian Sign Language Dictionary is to remove communication barriers between the deaf and hearing impaired communities of the country," Indian Social Justice and Empowerment Minister Thaawarchand Gehlot said at the release event.

The dictionary contains 3,000 English and Hindi words and their corresponding graphic image. And all these words are classified into five categories -- everyday, legal, academic, medical and technical terms, an official statement said.

"Gradually many new words will be added in the dictionary for the benefit of more and more people," the minister said.

There are over 5 million deaf and 2 million people with speech disability in India.