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News >> Technology >>
MS to promote local language computing
By agencies
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Tuesday, 12 April 2005, 19:30 IST
NEW DELHI: As part of its efforts to encourage development of IT applications in Indian languages, software major Microsoft Corporation India has launched 'Indic Developer Challenge' (IDC), a nation-wide contest aimed at budding local language developers in engineering colleges.
The company has decided to hunt local talent at engineering colleges and provide them necessary technical support for development of applications with interface in any Indian languages.
As a first step of this contest, Microsoft has reached out to the students directly through technical festivals at the IITs in Delhi & Mumbai and other prestigious institutions, to create awareness about the contest.
"With only 5 percent of India's population being English literate, it is imperative that technology be available in the local languages to truly make an impact at a mass level.
"With this latent need in mind, we conceptualized Project Bhasha, a collaborative program to engage with Indian governments, academia, industry and local developers for promoting local language computing,'' Raveesh Gupta, Senior Product Marketing Manager, Localization, Microsoft Corporation India Pvt. Ltd. said.
Towards delivering on this objective, we are actively working with various academic institutions such as universities of Banasthali and Mysore and the IISc to involve the student community in development of local language applications, he added.