Design Axes for the Indian Language Computing Market

Joseph Koshy

The Indic-Computing project

$Date: 2004-06-11 01:50:58 +0000 (Fri, 11 Jun 2004) $

Abstract

Despite nearly four decades of work, computing in local languages remains unavailable to the common man in the Indian subcontinent. In this article we identify seven core issues, namely power, usability, interoperability, locality of information, value addition, the effect of social structure and the quality of the supporting development ecosystem, that need to be addressed before pervasive Indian language computing can become a reality. We analyse a few existing projects and show that the levels of success achieved by these is consistent with their tackling of these seven core issues. Finally, we present a ``road map'' for making computing pervasive in Indian society and list the areas where the Indic-Computing Project hopes to make a contribution.

Document status: Fourth draft.

Table of Contents
1 Introduction
2 The Design ``Axes''
3 Analyses
4 Road map
5 Acknowledgments
6 Further Reading
Glossary

1 Introduction

The so-called ``digital divide'' remains a yawning gulf today for most Indian citizens. In a country with over one billion citizens, 99 out of 100 do not use computers. Numerous organizations have attempted in the past to increase the penetration of information processing technologies in the Indian sub-continent. To date, these efforts have been relatively unsuccessful (see the sidebar The Case of the Missing Market). Local language computing has not made inroads into mainstream Indian society.

We believe that this situation has arisen because prior efforts, while perhaps individually brilliant, have not taken note of the core characteristics that underlie the Indian context. Few people seem to have understood the ``big picture''.

Rather unsurprisingly, these core characteristics turn out to be different from those in so-called ``developed'' societies--in other words, a successful product or service for the Indian subcontinent has to be designed differently from one aimed at a ``developed'' market.

The major contributions of this article are as follows:

We identify seven core areas that a computing technology needs to address before it can succeed in the Indian context.
We provide a model that explains the lack of success of prior initiatives to bridge the digital divide. The model can be used to evaluate the impact a new technology would have in the Indian context.
We offer for discussion, a ``road map'' for pervasive Indian language computing that has a higher probability of success than current efforts..

The Case of the Missing Market

Estimates of the size of the Indian language computing market vary widely. A survey conducted by the Indian Institute of Information Technology, Bangalore described the existing Indian language market as predominantly DTP and print driven, with a market size of about INR 15 Crores (INR 150 million) in 1999-2000.

However, an article in the June 24th, 2002 issue of DataQuest, author Yograj Verma estimated that the potential size of the Indian language market to be as large as INR 65,260 Crores (INR 652.6 billion). According to this estimate, the potential size of the indigenous market rivals that of the existing ``export oriented'' software industry.

In reality, computing infrastructure has yet to make significant headway into Indian society. The use of computers remains an essentially urban phenomenon, mostly restricted to the English speaking elite in the country. There clearly is a gap between what the market could be and what today's market players are able to provide.

1.1 Target Audience

This document has been written with the following audiences in mind:

Planners designing computing infrastructure for developing societies. Many of issues highlighted here are likely be present in other developing societies, and the solutions developed would be of use there too.
Software developers and development managers interested in developing software for the Indian language software market.
Educators, especially those in Indian technical colleges.
Open-source developers attempting to add support for Indian languages to open-source software.

1.2 Prerequisites

Awareness of the technical issues in Indian language computing is assumed. The reader wishing to refresh his or her knowledge may find tutorial sections of the Indic-Computing Handbook, and some of the questions and answers in the Indic-Computing FAQ to be of help.

1.3 What this article is not

A few statements about what the article does not cover are also in order.

The article does not cover the benefits that a pervasive computing infrastructure brings to Indian society. It also does not go into the issues of the appropriateness of information technology; as with all tools, the use of information technology would be appropriate in certain contexts and inappropriate in others; the judgment call on this matter would need to be made by those involved.
We do not identify specific end-user solutions that are needed in the market today. Though there are many opportunities that we can see, discussing these would be outside the scope of this article. In this document, we sketch the broad architectural characteristics that we believe a successful solution in the Indian context will possess.

1.4 Structure of this document

The rest of this article is structured as follows:

In Section 2 we look at the seven core issues that need to be solved before any computing technology can succeed on a large-scale in the Indian context.
In Section 3 we analyse a few existing projects using the framework from Section 2.
Section 4 lists some of the next steps that need to be taken before pervasive computing can become a reality in the Indian context. This section also provides the rationale for the tasks that the Indic-Computing project has taken up.

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		The Design ``Axes''