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Rubber Duck
4th January 2006, 11:33 AM
http://www.indictrans.org/

GOAL: Against Digital Divide.

The goal of the team of Indictrans is to help in the bridging of the digital divide. We wish to reach the gains of information technology to 98% of the people who will not be comfortable in English.

The well trodden path to reach the people is education. We therefore wish to be able to bring world class educational resources to the schools. We believe the vernacular schools, which are getting equipped with computers should be our priority. However we wish to equip them with software resources, documentation, manuals and even support. We take one of our points of departure as Freeduc CD(from www.ofset.org ) which is now to be sponsored by no less than UNESCO. Now we wish to make these resources available in indian languages.

We believe that we have to start with operating system localisation. But our perspective is not restricted to just that. We wish to cover application development,customisation, localisation as well as prosyletise and support usage.

We wish to do this by inviting people from all walks of life to collaborate with us.We wish to provide collaboration tools on our website. We shall also enable collaboration through paper and snail-mail or any other hybrid approach. With minimum resources and depending less on money and more on spirit( love for people and love for language), we wish to trigger a resurrection in education.

Along with education, we expect small office and home users to also use computers widely. We are sure that such a penetration of computers will hinge on availability of computers in indian languages.

Parallelly, we also aim at taking all these to the villages and smaller towns. We hope to gain support from hardware manufacturers and philanthropists as also language lovers and development enthusiasts. Lastly, we expect the government agencies to recognise the efforts and provide support.

Effectively we wish to carry GNU philosophy to its practical conclusion of true community building. This will effectively result in bridging the digital divide between digital have's and digital have-not's. Hope you will add yourself to this mission.

Rubber Duck
4th January 2006, 11:50 AM
Well maybe those people won't make much of an impact?

In that case it is bloody certain that this lot will!

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


Local Language Information Technology Market in India

By Cathy Wissink - Windows Globalization, Microsoft Corporation

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.



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.