Thursday, Mar. 22, 2001

Tech India: The Next Big Thing

By SARITHA RAI

Thursday, Mar. 22, 2001 One of India's most enduring pastimes, chewing paan, has been immortalized on the web. Visit Muchhad's paan shop and you can order the Indian delicacy by e- mail, or you can help keep Mumbai clean by "Playing the Muchhad Game" in your Internet browser. Paan, in case you were wondering, is betel leaf filled with a variety of ingredients and rolled into a cone.

If Muchhad, as the famed, mustachioed paan guru Jaishankar Tiwari is popularly known, had his way, his website would have been in Hindi, his native tongue. But Muchhad, from India's northern Uttar Pradesh state, can take heart. Soon the Internet in India will no longer be the sole terrain of the English-educated urban yuppie.

Earlier this month, Network Solutions announced that they would provide domain names in local Indian languages. This means websites in most of India's official languages: Hindi, Tamil, Kannada, Telugu, Gujarati, Malayalam, Oriya and Bengali. But local domain names are only the beginning. It must be quickly followed by standards for local language keyboards, as well as localized content in a variety of languages.

India already has an unparalleled success story in creating localized content -- the cable television industry -- and the Internet industry should take cue from it. Today, the country's cable television operators boast 40 million users.

Until now, India has largely ignored local language content on the Internet, unlike China and Japan. Not that it is easy to cater to a population of one billion Indians speaking a bewildering array of languages and dialects. But some companies have already started developing Indian language software; Indore-based Webdunia is billed as the world's first Hindi portal. And the government-run C- DAC (Center for Development of Advanced Computing) provided the language software used during the recent national census.

India will have a projected 50 million Internet users by 2003, some eight times more than today's six million users. Of these 50 million, at least half will be non-English speakers. The local language Internet market is going to be India's Next Big Thing.