Come August 15, 2007, and India will celebrate its 60th year of Independence. Over the last six decades, the country has evolved a tri-lingual formula comprising Hindi, English and the regional/local language; with mainly Hindi and English at the national level.
This is perhaps why a local language interface is not yet crucial to the functioning of most organizations quite unlike the situation in Europe and Japan. While the language for ‘talking businesses at the regional level’ continues to be the state or regional language, the actual computing or business transactions are still done largely in English. While on the one hand, English speaking businessmen, office executives, corporates and students drive much of the hardware and software market, the market for language software has remained fragmented. Therefore, IT channel partners do not find it lucrative enough to play in this segment.
Many of my friends in the channel, especially in Mumbai or Bangalore say that there’s no real demand for vernacular software.True, IT applications have been primarily English dominated. Hovering in single digits for a long time, several government schemes or semi-government initiatives can push the PC penetration to 65 per thousand by the year 2008. Now look at the irony while only 5% of Indians are familiar with English the primary computing platform in India the remaining 95% which makes up for an estimated over 95 crore population, communicate in Indian languages and thus a huge untapped potential for computing.
The e-governance initiatives in several states are fortunately making good business sense for software product companies and also the channels. Sometime back, Dr Pushpak Bhattacharya, a protagonist of language software at IIT, Mumbai, had estimated the market to be worth 1 billion dollars. The Pune-based Government of India Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (CDAC) estimate was, however, at Rs 500 crore.
But these are references to the market potential, rather than figures denoting the existing market. G B Gupta of Tristar Software, Bhubeneswar says, “The language software has simply not caught up with people s imagination.” The story could be similar in other states also. But there is no denying the fact that there are many vacant slots left for language software business among the resellers.
In states like Gujarat and Uttaranchal, it s mainly the education segment that has helped language software business flourish. One reason for this, unlike the state of Andhra Pradesh, is that the state governments in these states have allowed outsourcing of language software in state-run educational institutions. Moreover, amidst the general perception of language software being either stagnant or on the decline, the publishing industry has given the much needed breathing space a saving grace to this space.
There are also serious technical hurdles. Dr Bhattacharya of IIT, Mumbai says that Unicode-based standardization will be a major step as experts find it tough to define a character set and an accompanying encoding scheme that would apply to all the Indian scripts uniformly.
While the technical hurdles will certainly be taken care of and actual implementation of various e-governance projects may take some time, the channels can prepare themselves for planning a key role by developing their own niche like specialization in font-based software and train their employees in this direction. The push is already evident as, according to Microsoft, 20% of all MS office licenses sold is of localized version. Thanks to further encouragement to e-governance projects in this year s budget, Red Hat is also betting on e-governance projects to give an impetus to the growth of the language desktops.