WITH COMPUTER LITERACY ON THE RISE, COMPANIES and user groups in India are increasingly concerned about making the Internet available to the masses that do not read or write English. But with some 1652 native tongues and half-a-dozen language groups, the sheer logistics of the assignment has stumped all but a few of the developers in Indian Language computing.

The initial advances in the field of Indian language computing were made by the Center for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC). C-DAC, along with the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur started work in 1983 on a Generalized Indian Script Terminal (GIST) and Indian Script Code for Information Interchange (ISCII). Ever since, various players have developed a considerable number of “workaround” solutions. However, the sector has been plagued by lack of funding for product development.

A recent study by the Indian Institute of Information Technology, Bangalore (IIITB) and Manufacturer’s Association of Information Technology (MAIT) estimates the multi-lingual computing solutions industry to be at around $2.6 million by 2005. Industry watchers contend that content services will drive growth in this field. The IIITB-MAIT survey also point to the emergence of multilingual accounting software by private sector players as well as C-DAC, as an indication of the potential for growth in the vernacular computing market. In addition, customized application development has also evolved mainly through National Informatics Center (NIC) and a few private developers (Aarkay Foundation, New Delhi). However, the market is still concentrated around word processing and DTP. With a number of Indian websites going multi-lingual, the market for vernacular internet enabled applications is increasing. However, very few, if any, use established text encoding standards. Analysts and developers point to this as the single most important reason for the lack of growth in Indian language content.

The IIITB survey cites ‘lack of universally accepted standard, slow pace of computerization, and lack of familiarity with the user interface (keyboards)’ as the key reasons for the lack of growth.