The Linux Localisation Initiative

The Linux Localisation Initiative

http://lli.linux-bangalore.org/articles/articlesr.php?rel=1

linux-bangalore.org Author : Frank Pohlmann

C-DAC launches Janabhaaratii FLOSS localisation project

C-DAC launches Janabhaaratii FLOSS localisation project

http://www.linux-india.org/index.pl?id=3055&isa=NewsArticle&op=show

C-DAC, the Indian government-run Centre for the Development of Advanced Computing, has announced in October 2004 the launch of the launch of its “janabhaaratii” project for localisation of FLOSS. It suggested the goal would be “development, deployment and community building, and the work would be put out under the GPL/LGPL licenses.

This, it said, would aim “to contribute to the community efforts in developing a software suite based on GNU/Linux to be made available in Indian languages”. This project is being funded by the Government of India’s Technology Development in Indian Languages (TDIL) group of the Department of Information Technology,

More details from the official press release are http://www.cdacindia.com/html/press/4q04/prs_rl158.asp

“The primary objective of the project is to enable the wide spread use of Indian language computing through Free/Open Source systems and applications localized in Indian languages,” the C-DAC announced.

C-DAC is known for a number of other Indian-language computing solutions, but its involvement in the field of Linux and FLOSS is seen to be not as much as it could have done.

Some of the C-DAC’s earlier Indian-language solutions include ALP-Personal (the Apex Language Processor, an Indian language word-processor on DOS), GIST-SDK (a Windows-based application development kit for Indian languages), iplugin (an Indian-language web application development tool for interactive applications which promises browser-independence for MS Windows-based clients), and others.

Its ISM Import is a utility that converts data from other font formats into ISFOC format. LEAP Mail offers e-mail in Indian languages. LISM is a Linux-based application for Indian languages. iLEAP is an Internet-ready word processor, which works on the MS Windows platform. The INSRIPT keyboard tutor is a DOS-based utility meant for learning to use one of the keyboard layouts used to type Indic languages.

C-DAC said its new venture “aims at inviting, building and supporting” community initiatives to “produce and disseminate free/open source software systems, applications and content to help proliferate the use of IT in our society, breaking language barriers and through affordable means to bridge the so-called digital divide.”

This project, it said, would cover the development of technology to suit Indian languages, and target diverse areas such as the home-use, mass applications, education, rural areas, infokiosks, cybercafes, e-governance, and content creation.

“The project inherits and will enhance the access and usability of the resources and capabilities garnered by C-DAC in Indian language technologies over the last 15 years,” it was officially stated.

C-DAC, Mumbai — one of the centres of this institution — sees itself as having been “at the forefront” of the Indian language technology mission with its INDIX project for making the GNU/Linux operating systems specifically intelligent about indic scripts and “provide the world with a more generic approach to deal with these complex scripts”.

(C-DAC reminded that many of the fonts developed under the INDIX project are now also available to the public from the TDIL website-http://www.tdil.mit.gov.in/download/openfonts.htm )

Acknowledging the work of others — including determined volunteers — C-DAC said the project “stands on the shoulders of several teams working on the localization of GNU/Linux, namely, the IITs, IIITs, Indlinux, ankurbangla, HBCSE (TIFR), FSF India, and corporations like IBM and so on”.

These groups have put in strenuous efforts to work towards the localisation of computing in India, sometimes with amazing results.

“Several resource centres supported by the TDIL have also stacked up a large amount of localization resources. The project envisages the threading together of these efforts, to present to the community a suite of software components in ready usable form through Open Source under GPL/LGPL licences,” said the C-DAC.

Dr. Alka Irani of C-DAC Mumbai has been named the chief investigator for the project. Prof. Jitendra Shah from Veermata Jijabai Technical Institute (VJTI) — a long time localisation campaigner — will also be collaborating on the project, and has joined C-DAC, Mumbai, it was announced.

Said the C-DAC in its official release: “The nature and the scope of the project being such, C-DAC also extends an invitation to language specialists, linguists, computer specialists, users, governments (Centre and States), academia (faculty and students) and others to join this mission and bring the benefits of the IT revolution to the majority of the population.” (ENDS)

See story at http://www.cdacindia.com/html/press/4q04/prs_rl158.asp

C-DAC launches ‘janabhaaratii’© Project Localization of Free/Open Source Software

C-DAC launches ‘janabhaaratii’^© Project Localization of Free/Open Source Software

http://www.cdac.in/html/press/4q04/prs_rl158.asp

Mumbai, October 11, 2004

Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC) has announced the launch of its “janabhaaratii” project entitled “Localization of Free/ Open Source Software: Development, Deployment and Community Building” to contribute to the community efforts in developing a software suite based on GNU/Linux to be made available in Indian languages. The project is being funded by the Technology Development in Indian Languages (TDIL) group of the Department of Information Technology, Ministry of Communications and IT, Government of India.

The primary objective of the project is to enable the wide spread use of Indian language computing through Free/Open Source systems and applications localized in Indian languages. It aims at inviting, building and supporting community initiatives to produce and disseminate free/ open source software systems, applications and content to help proliferate the use of IT in our society, breaking language barriers and through affordable means to bridge the so-called digital divide. The project will cover the development of technology to suit Indian languages, its dissemination and deployment into diverse areas such as home use, mass applications, education, rural areas, infokiosks, cybercafes, e-governance, content creation and so on.

The project inherits and will enhance the access and usability of the resources and capabilities garnered by C-DAC in Indian language technologies over the last 15 years. C-DAC, Mumbai has been at the forefront of the Indian language technology mission with its INDIX project for making GNU/Linux operating systems specifically intelligent about indic scripts and provide the world with a more generic approach to deal with these complex scripts. (Many of the fonts developed under the INDIX project are now also available to the public from the TDIL website-http://www.tdil.mit.gov.in/download/openfonts.htm)

Further, the project stands on the shoulders of several teams working on the localization of GNU/Linux, namely, the IITs, IIITs, Indlinux, ankurbangla, HBCSE (TIFR), FSF India, and Corporations like IBM and so on. Several Resource Centres supported by the TDIL have also stacked up a large amount of localization resources. The project envisages the threading together of these efforts, to present to the community a suite of software components in ready usable form through Open Source under GPL/LGPL licences.

Dr. Alka Irani, C-DAC, Mumbai is the chief investigator for the project. Prof. Jitendra Shah from Veermata Jijabai Technical Institute (VJTI) will also be collaborating on the project, and has joined C-DAC, Mumbai.

The nature and the scope of the project being such, C-DAC also extends an invitation to language specialists, linguists, computer specialists, users, governments (Centre and States), academia (faculty and students) and others to join this mission and bring the benefits of the IT revolution to the majority of the population.

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Text-to-Speech and Automatic Speech Recognition in Indian Languages (Matrubhasha)

Text-to-Speech and Automatic Speech Recognition in Indian Languages (Matrubhasha)

http://www.ictrt.org.in/modules.php?name=Pages&pa=showpage&id=12
Introduction

In the present era of human computer interaction, the educationally under privileged and the rural communities of India are being deprived of technologies that pervade the growing interconnected web of computers and communications. One good solution for this problem would be computers talking to the common man in the language he is comfortable to communicate in. Indian population has a significant percentage of people who are educationally under-privileged. There are still quite a large number of areas where people do not have the capabilities of 3R’s. The digital divide under such circumstances is constantly on a rise, where on one hand we claim that India is leading in IT and on the other hand, the advances we make are totally inaccessible by a large number of countrymen. Under such circumstances, we cannot expect rural/educationally under-privileged countrymen to use computers and IT products unless we remove the need of being literate, which exists as a barrier between them and computers.

Major Issues

In this information age, storage and retrieval of information in a convenient manner has gained importance. Because of the near-universal adoption of World Wide Web as a repository of information for unconstrained and wide dissemination, information is now broadly available on the Internet and is accessible from remote sites. However, the interaction between the computer and the user is largely through keyboard and screen-oriented systems. In the current Indian context, this restricts the usage to a miniscule fraction of the population, who are both computer-literate and conversant with written English. In order to enable a wider proportion of population to benefit from Information technology, there is a dire need for an interface other than keyboard and screen-interface that is widely in use at present. Speech, being a natural means of communication among human beings, can also provide a consummate platform for man-machine interaction. It is also desirable that human-machine interface permits one’s native language of communication. In the context of a multi-lingual country like India, this can be of immense value to our country where literacy rate is considerably low. Certain efforts are currently been undertaken to develop OS and applications, which support the local languages. Localization efforts have been undertaken by most of the leading OS vendors and promoters, which include Microsoft (Windows), Red Hat (Linux), NCST (Indix), IIT Madras (IndLinux) etc. These OS’s support some of the leading Indian languages by using international coding standards (Unicode). Speech technologies promise to be the next generation user interface. Software application having speech and voice recognition abilities have a better chance to communicate with a large percentage of population which include educationally under-privileged, visually challenged and computer illiterates, if these applications can speak and understand the native language. Hence we put forward the API (Application Programming Interface) Model based on Unicode for Text to Speech Synthesis and Automatic Speech Recognition in Indian languages.

Why Unicode?

Unicode is the international standard that encodes characters in 16 bits as opposed to the ASCII standard encoding 8 bits. The Unicode Standard is the universal character-encoding standard used for representation of text for computer processing. Unicode provides a consistent way of encoding multilingual plain text. The design of Unicode is based on the simplicity and consistency of ASCII but goes far beyond ASCII’s limited ability to encode only the Latin alphabet. The Unicode Standard provides the capacity to encode all of the characters used for the written languages of the world. To keep character coding simple and efficient, the Unicode standard assigns each character a unique numeric value and name. It has laid out provisions for encoding all scripts in the world, and has been agreed upon by all major software providers, as well as international governments, as the most suitable character representation for all major character sets. The advantage of using Unicode as character set will enable the TTS engine to recognize different Indian languages in the same document or character string, where as using a separate encoding format for each of the languages would not support the same. All the content development applications such as Office Suite’s, Star-Office, and Open-Office etc. are already being localized using Unicode. Unicode is already playing a significant part with respect to localization and internationalisation. Since it handles the characters for all languages in a uniform way, it avoids the complexities of different character code architectures. All of the modern operating systems, from PCs to mainframes, support Unicode now or are actively developing support for it. The same is true of databases, as well. In this scenario, Unicode would be the best option to go with, in the context of the current problem being discussed about!

Why API Model?

While we talk about IT being completely in-reach of the common countrymen, it is not just enough to have an operating system, or one specific application that supports local language speech synthesis or speech recognition. The point is that in the current juncture where in the growth and impact of technology is day by day rising exponentially; any software application is a candidate for localization. Hence, we put forward this API model so that any software developer can incorporate speech capabilities into one’s application, thus extending the reach of the product even to the masses.

Mr. Raman and the Matrubhasha Team

Enable Indian language typing support to the existing e-mail portal of Satyam Infoway (SIFY)

Enable Indian language typing support to the existing e-mail portal of Satyam Infoway (SIFY)

http://www.cdac.in/html/about/success/sify-mail-gist.asp

Problem Statement

Enable users to send & receive e-mails in regional languages viz.
Assamese, Bengali, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Oriya, Punjabi, Sanskrit, Tamil, and Telugu through the existing e-mail facility of mail.sify.com.

Solution:

A customized iPlugin was developed and delivered as per SIFYs requirement, which enables users to type their e-mail in 11 regional languages. The regional languages supported are Assamese, Bengali, Gujarati, Marathi, Hindi, Kannada, Oriya, Punjabi, Sanskrit, Tamil, and Telugu.

When a client logs into mail.sify.com with his e-mail id for the first time, he / she has to select the language in which he / she wants to type the e-mail. Based on the language selected the user will be automatically prompted to download the required language components. This is a one-time process for that particular language. The next time onwards the user can simply log in, select language and start typing.

The components that are downloaded one time at the client end (e.g. for Hindi, Marathi) are
DV_GistFontResourcesforWeb Control: 100KB
iPlugin Control : 164KB

A floating keyboard in the respective language also assists in composing the e-mail. When the e-mail is sent to the respective destination, if the fonts already exist at the recipients end, then the data is properly displayed. However, in case the required fonts are not available then the recipient has to download and execute the .exe attached with the mail which copies the requisite fonts to the fonts folder of the recipients machine. This is again a one-time activity.

Acknowledging the quality of the product developed and the capable services rendered by the GIST group of C-DAC, Pune, Mr K Bhaskar, DGM-Technical, Sify Limited says It has been a pleasure in choosing this product and working with you in understanding and implementing this solution. We have now provided language mail for our users in mail.sify.com

System: Linux as server and PHP as scripting language. The client side computer on which the typing is done, uses Windows OS and IE as the browser.

 

 

eGovernance through Regional Languages:: 5% Speak English::95% Speak 18 different languages

eGovernance through Regional Languages

http://www.cdac.in/html/egov/article.asp

Out of a billion population, there are only 5% people in India who know or speak English, with balance 95% (950 million) people speaking or practicing in at least 18 different officially recognized languages. This poses both a challenge and an opportunity.

With increasing recognition of information technology in catalyzing economic activity and efficient governance, countries have benefited through eGovernance. In India, application of Indian languages on computers has driven eGovernance initiatives. C-DAC has applied language technologies successfully to a number of eGovernance solutions to deliver efficient Government Services in a transparent manner.

Practically all world economies have recognized importance of information technology in catalyzing economic activity, in efficient governance and in human resource development. They have, therefore, made significant investments and successfully integrated it with the development process in reaping the benefits of the information technology revolution that is taking place globally, to their society. In India, likewise, these developments have impacted the Industrial, Education, Service and Government sectors, and their influence on various applications is increasingly being felt of late.

As the era of digital economy is evolving, a significant impact of these developments has been felt in eGovernance. The questions often asked in the context are:

 

• How government can become more responsive and accessible?
• How can the government enhance its role as a catalyst of economic growth?
• How can one provide better Government services? and
• How can the Government use advanced technologies for transferring benefits to the society in terms of improving health care, education, administrative and citizen interface services?

eGovernance consequently has emerged as a technologically driven methodology to realize economic prosperity leading to transparency, providing information speedily to all citizens, improving administrative efficiency, improving public services, higher velocity of business, improved productivity and an exciting business opportunity.

In a large, geographically dispersed, demographic multilingual country India, the common thread in implementing and achieving these basic objectives of eGovernance has been the development and adoption of language computing tools and methodologies. The Government officials in various provinces, the non-government functionaries across the country and the people, mostly use their own language in day-to-day work, be it in Government administration at various levels, in business, in profession, in services or in school education. Thus, if the fruits of information technology revolution have to spread to all these participating members, in Government and public, it is best done through the use of computers in their own languages.

Out of a billion population, there are only 5% people in India who know or speak English, with balance 95% (950 million) people speaking or practicing in at least 18 different officially recognized languages. This poses both a challenge and an opportunity.

The Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC) has made pioneering contributions in developing Indian language tools with natural language processing, and in evolving script and font standards through its GIST technology, to enable and spread use of computers in various languages. It accordingly took up the initiative of developing important eGovernance solutions in Indian languages, which impact Government and the citizens both. This initiative started in 1997 and has grown to a significant extent by the end of 2001. Significant parameters of this initiative were:

 

• Improve government’s own functioning
• Provide better service to citizens in a transparent manner
• Reduce hassles, corruption and drudgery in various government bodies – public interactive functions

Significant information technology based applications developed and successfully commissioned under this initiative are:

 

• Public Works Department (Maharashtra State) – Covered Works, Accounts, Employees and Tender management modules networking the various 250 state offices to lead to an improved, transparent and efficient system of works services. Involved an outlay of Rs. 10.5 crores (U.S. $ 2.0 Million) to address Works Services of an average Rs. 2500 crore (US$ 500 Million) of the PWD – Maharashtra. This is now proposed for other States also.

• Stamp Registration (Maharashtra and U.P. States) – Provided on-line property registration, valuation and report generation across 366 offices at various state administrative units, reducing time from several days to mere 20 minutes for an individual, and increasing number of registered documents from 16 to 40 per day with 10 – 15% revenue increase. Involved an outlay of Rs. 5.5 crores (US$ 1 Million) to address a Statewide annual revenue of Rs. 2000 crores (US$ 400 Million).

• Municipal Corporations (Karnataka) – Computerized major functions of property tax valuation/collection, issue and record of death/birth certificates, water supply billing, consumer complaints and internal MIS functions providing improved citizen services. Involved an outlay of Rs. 2.5 crores (US$ 0.5 Million) in the first phase of six Corporations to address a budget of Rs. 2000 crores (US$ 400 Million).

• Octroi collection (Nashik – Maharashtra) – Dispensed with cash collection at remote check posts, providing instant valuation, receipt and reconciliation of accounts in a transparent manner. Total outlay Rs. 60 lakhs (US$ 0.1 Million).

• Decision Support System (Andhra Pradesh State) – Implemented a data warehouse of land and person data of 60 million population to enable well informed, timely and accurate policy decisions by the Government officials across various departments. Involved an outlay of Rs. 5 crores (US$ 1 Million) to address the total State data.

• Hospital Management System (Specialty and Government Hospitals) - Implemented to improve Healthcare services for the patients. Involved an outlay of Rs. 1.5 crore (US$ 0.3 Million) over two hospitals of 500 beds and 1500 beds respectively.

• GIS based Land Management (Industrial Development Corporations) - Implemented at a cost of Rs. 55 lakhs (US$ 0.11 Million) to provide web-based access to land data covering allotment, transfer, mortgage, surrender, etc. of industrial development units, in the particular case for MIDC, Maharashtra.

• Archives Computerization - This application enables effective scanning and archival of various types of old documents with proper enhancement, indexing and retrieval facilities. This application has been successfully deployed for Department of Archives, Govt. of Maharashtra.

All these applications have been very effective in the achievement of their objective, have involved significant technology component covering web, data warehousing, database architecture, Geomatics, Scan/Archive, advanced software tools, and applied in a most innovative manner, ensured replicability to other organizations by building a licensable software product. These also enabled, through business process re-engineering, an effective organizational change to ease their functions and offer a more productive service to the intended beneficiaries. Their relevance has been equally brought about by providing language technology component of significance to the target user group(s), which have broken any language barriers by enabling users to interact with computers in their own languages.

C-DAC groups were organized activity-wise to implement various development projects that were commissioned during the period 1997-2001. The groups comprised of approximately 100 software professionals who worked over an approximate budget of Rs. 30 crores (US$ 6 million) to address the direct business of over Rs. 6500 crores (US$ 1.3 Billion) of the State Governments annually. This initiate is now being spread to other parts of the country to similarly provide effective solutions and services.

C-DAC is an institution of a 575 regular plus 175 contract staff of high skills in advanced information technologies, training and business activities. It is an autonomous scientific institution of the Ministry of Communications and Information Technology, Govt. of India. It currently operates on an annual budget of Rs. 100 crores (US$ 20 million) and works with a network of 100 plus partner institutions in the private enterprise for providing training and support services countrywide.

Set up over a decade ago, as India’s national initiative for design, development and delivery of high performance computing (supercomputer systems) and solutions based on parallel processing technology, C-DAC has over the years diversified its activities, transferring the expertise it acquired and technologies it developed in the high-end computing to develop and deploy Information Technology (IT) based solutions in various sectors of economy. Through this approach, it has maintained a balance between developing strategic technologies needed in the country in the high performance computing area for achieving self-reliance, and addressing mission critical problems in the science and engineering fields on one hand, and using expertise developed to commercialize its technologies and products to meet the requirements in various sectors of economy on the other.

ICT Research and Training Centre, India.

Welcome to the ICT Research and Training Centre, India.

 http://www.ictrt.org.in/

The Government of India is a member of the
Development Gateway Foundation, a World Bank
initiative.

An Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) – Research & Training (R&T) Centre of the Foundation has been set up in Bangalore, India with Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC) as the Project Implementing Agency and the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Bombay as the first collaborating institution.

 

 Language Technology
The dependency on English and other foreign langauges has become main stream and it influences all avenues of our day-to-day life. The aim of this is to develop Indian language technologies inorder to empower the ‘digitally impoverished’.

Projects:

BharateeyaOO

This project aims at enabling the support of Indian Languages within the OpenOffice.org office suite on the main software platforms, so as to facilitate the digital representation, collection and distribution of information by ensuring access to information technology seamless over natural language barriers. Indian language support in the suite will be through localization of the complete user interface and help, in Hindi, Tamil, Kannada, Punjabi, Gujarati, Telugu, Bengali and Malayalam. Internationalization support will also be developed featuring editing and complex text layout processing in Indian scripts, Indian language currency, calendar and spell checking.

Cross Lingual Information Retrieval

The web is a critical and vast source of information in today’s world. However most of the information is in English, which is understood by less than 5% of the Indian population. Search engines are the primary mechanisms to find information on the web. However most of the search engines do not allow querying in Indian languages. Even though a few offer screen layout and static text in Hindi, the querying and results retrieved are still in English. So a person literate in Indian languages but not well versed in English is deprived of access to a vast store of information. To bridge this Digital Language Divide, one of the key technologies required is Cross Lingual Information Retrieval (CLIR). The proposed CLIR system aims at enabling a person to query the web for documents related to health issues and obtain the results, in Hindi.

Other Initiatives:	News And Events:
IndiX	DGF Article – BharteeyaOO
LEAP OFFICE 2000	GNU Linux enabled for five Indian Languages
MaTra
SHAKTI OFFICE SUITE
Shree-Lipi Ankur Script Processor
Lila Hindi Pragya
Learn Indian Language Through Artificial Intelligence (LILA)
Speech Synthesis System

 

BharateeyaOO.o: OpenOffice.org in Indian Languages

BharateeyaOO.o: OpenOffice.org in Indian Languages

http://www.ncb.ernet.in/bharateeyaoo/index.shtml

Welcome

What’s BharateeyaOO.o?

     BharateeyaOO.o = Bharateeya(Indian) + OO.o(OpenOffice.org)

The BharateeyaOO.o project is an initiative to bring OpenOffice.org  to India in Indian languages, by the ICT Research and Training Centre (India), as part of activities of the Development Gateway Foundation. Read further on to understand our motivations in doing this project, as well as our offerings…

 

Localizing free software, for a free country

Localizing free software, for a free country

http://indlinux.org/

Language Teams:
Hindi, Oriya
Assamese, Bengali, Gujarati, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Punjabi, Tamil and Telugu
Other Localization Teams:
Dzongkha (Bhutan), Nepali (Nepal) , Sinhala (Sri Lanka), Pan Localization.

IRC – #indlinux at irc.freenode.net

Proceed to Project Wiki

• About
  More about the project.
• Sourceforge Project
  Developer space at Sourceforge.
• Mailing Lists
  Discuss everything about localization of Linux.
• Links
  Various other related links.
• Contribute
  Help us with the localization.

Feedback welcome at feedback AT indlinux.org

Local Language Information Technology Market in India

Local Language Information Technology Market in India

By Cathy Wissink – Windows Globalization, Microsoft Corporation

http://bhashaindia.com/patrons/News/itmarket/index.aspx

Executive Summary

There is a huge untapped potential that needs to be explored by the government and the vendors to ensure successful use of local language computing applications.

The local language computing sector requires a boost to encourage the use of local language computing applications among the masses. Some of the projects initiated by the government have failed primarily due to the lack of commercialization of technology and lax timelines for projects. Moreover, the majority of the players in the sector are mid-sized companies or educational institutions with limited financial muscle; hence they often tend to be restrained in terms of their research and development (R&D) spending on new technologies. The key to success lies in reducing redundancies and enabling positive amalgamation of ideas and sharing of knowledge among government institutions, academia and vendors. A collective and combined approach is required to generate adequate content. Machine translation and creation of lexware, dictionaries, and WORDNET also need a collaborative approach that can lead to a faster development and intelligent computer learning of the language

Both the central and the state governments need to encourage the use of local language applications in their departments. It is of equal importance to ensure that most of the software for workflow process and documentation systems is enabled in local languages. The government needs to ensure that all real-life applications step out of planning stage and get implemented at the respective departments, thereby providing relevant and real-time information in local languages to citizens of India.

Market strategies based on the diffusion model for the local language IT ecosystem has been provided. Read more on: Benefits of Local Language Computing Competitive Analysis Market Overview Technology Trends

Initiatives in Local Language Market

Only 3 percent of the Indian population can speak in English while close to 40 percent of the Indian population speaks Hindi or one of its variants. Still, the medium of communication in higher education, judiciary, bureaucracy, and the corporate sector is English. Since English is the medium of interaction in IT systems too, structurally, such a situation aggravates the divide between segments of population that have access to computing and the ones that don’t. To arrest this situation, an important step has come from the Ministry of Communication and Information Technology in the form of The Technology Development for Indian Languages (TDIL). TDIL has been mandated to bridge the digital divide by developing IT tools in local languages in India.

Since 1991, TDIL has sponsored research in developing Indian language computing resources, processing systems, tools and translation support systems and localization of software for Indian languages. The other key initiatives have come in from development of Human-Machine Interface Systems and development of web centric applications. TDIL operates on a distributed innovation model through collaborations with 13 resource centers across India. Some of the notable milestones have come through CDAC, a collaborative partner of TDIL in form of GIST (Graphics and Intelligence-based Script) that has brought diverse users to employ local language IT tools. Applications have ranged from desktop publishing to sub-titles in TV broadcast in various Indian languages. A Local Language word processor, ‘LEAP’ has brought desktop publishing to a large segment of population in a language they can communicate in naturally.Read more on: Need for Local language software Initiatives by other government departments

Industry Challenges

While the eventual benefits of increasing access to local language IT resources to a large segment of the population is clear, there are multiple challenges that the fledgling Indian market will have to overcome before the avowed vision is taken to reality.

Some of the key challenges confronting the market at this point of time are: Lack of universal standards for scripts and fonts, input devices and transliteration Limited availability of software and fonts Low availability of local language content Read more on: Identification of Challenges facing the Indian Local Language Software Market

Local Language Software Market-Vendor Analysis

The Local Language IT market is in a development stage and the market is expected to grow at a healthy rate of 80 percent (CAGR) from $ 11 Million in 2002 to $ 64 Million in 2005.

The key drivers that will drive exponential growth for this market will be Newer areas of application for Local language IT Broad based e-Governance initiatives that will employ local language as a front end to disseminate Government services to citizens and Bundling of multi-lingual software with PC’s and other access devices

The market for Local Language IT is also likely to face a number of restraints that could inhibit the pace of adoption. They are: Lack of formal language-based IT training Limited usage of available local language applications Lack of spending Low connectivity

The Local Language IT market constitutes predominantly of word processing. Word Processing applications revenues in 2002 constituted 48 percent of the total market, with Packages and DTP constituting 20 percent and 18 percent respectively. While word processing software will continue to occupy a lion’s share of the total revenues by 2005, package applications and local language multimedia and video applications are likely to grow at a significant pace.

Reflecting the diverse application areas that local language IT will be used across in the future, consulting services revenues are expected to see a big jump. Consulting services revenues were 47 percent in 2002; by 2005 the consulting services revenues are expected to grow to 67 percent of the total market. Investments by Governments on e-Governance will find a way to the Local Language IT market. The share of e-Governance will increase from 38 percent in 2002 to 58 percent in 2005.

The Local Language IT market constitutes of about 12 to 14 vendors. Most of the domestic players are regional and have limited access to the market. They offer both off-the-shelf products and custom made applications in all the major Indian languages. The other set of key player in the Local Language IT market are international players. International vendors are yet to take off in a big way in terms of the application offering across different languages. IBM offers a Hindi version of Lotus Notes in India. However, the participation of international vendors is expected to increase in the next three years. C-DAC, owing to its pioneering initiatives in the Local Language IT market has acquired the leadership place with 48 percent market share in the year 2002. C-DAC is the top leader in both the product and consulting services space. Modular follows up with 23 percent market share.Read more on: Market Engineering measurement analysis Market Overview and Definitions

There is an overall consensus on the benefits of e-Governance in India. While a wide variance exists between states in terms of their e-Governance initiatives, it is expected that over the medium term, a greater number of states will provide services to citizens over the electronic medium. Deploying Local Language IT as a part of State and Central e-Governance implementations will serve the cause of improving the reach and quality of services offered across a wide section of the citizens.

E-Governance Initiatives and Potential for Local Language Market

State Governments have deployed citizen services in local languages and the early benefits are clearly visible. Early Government-to-Citizen Portals such as eSeva have proved the feasibility of the model. Frost & Sullivan expects this trend to extend on both scale and scope: a wider bouquet of services will be available to a larger section of citizens.

Andhra Pradesh is the state with the biggest spend on Local Language IT contributing 23.6 percent to the total market revenues for the Industry. Gujarat is the second highest spender followed closely by West Bengal.

Content Benefits of Local Language Computing Market Overview Major Findings Technology Trends Need for Local Language Software TDIL Initiative Initiatives by Other Government Departments C-DAC Identification of Challenges facing the Indian Local Language Software Market Market Engineering Measurement Analysis Market Restraints Market Drivers Market and Technology Trends Market Share Analysis Revenue Forecasts Competitive Structure Product Analysis Market Overview and Definitions Education Publishing Segment Small and Medium Enterprises Banks Health Tourism Background

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