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Curry-flavoured MS
Office tools
Chennai Kavigal, which is this firm’s untypical name, has been working on making IT work in Indian languages. "We started with word-processing and now have an entire office suite. We’re working on hand-writing recognition, and porting these options to (the ‘free’ operating system of) GNU/Linux," CEO Manoj Annadurai told TWN Features. Such a solution holds out exciting possibilities; not just because the average computer user badly needs ‘office’ tools, that allow for commonly used computer tasks to be carried out. More importantly, such tools are sorely lacking in many Indian languages, at an affordable price. This firm Chennai Kavigal’s product called ‘Shakti’ seeks to do the work of MS Office. But in Indian languages. "You don’t have to buy a suite of seven different applications. This offers all products in one," says Manoj. It currently comes in Hindi-English and Tamil-English versions. Priced at Rs 1,995 this seeks to offer an affordable product to Indian computer users who would be more familiar using this tool in their regional language. Chennai Kavigal has a staff of about 40. "We’ve got a good response to this product," says Manoj, a mechanical engineer and CEO of the company. They are already working in the other south Indian language of Telugu and plan to enter Marathi, Gujarati and Bengali shortly. "It doesn’t come with all bells and whistles of MS Word. But this is a functional word processor," explains Manoj, pointing to one of his products. What’s the logic of going about recreating office productivity tools in Indian language versions? Manoj points out that legal copy of proprietorial software products of foreign origin — though simple to operate and under-friendly — are "prohibitively expensive". More so, in an Indian context, where the average per capita income a year hovers around $ 300. "IIT-Chennai (the prestigious centre for training top-notch engineers) and Chennai Kavigal wanted to do something about that. We wanted the entire office tools to be available to the Indian language user, at an affordable cost. In a language that they found useful," says he. To make this solution useful, it should ideally be bilingual, if not trilingual. Ideally, it could include English (the ‘colonial’ language but still widely used to interconnect different parts of the nation and known by most who have gone in for a higher education), Hindi (the national language and widely spoken in North India) and the regional language. India has nearly 18 officially recognised languages. On the whole, this country of over a thousand million persons is believed to have 1652 mother tongues. Of these, around 33 are spoken by persons numbering over one lakh. Manoj stresses that to make this useful and relevant to the common man, the software needs to be inexpensively priced. Getting regional language
solutions in India is not easy. Indian language computing has its own
complications. Keyboards and computing has been geared to meet the needs
of a 26-alphabet English language. Indian languages have a "few
hundred" character and character-combinations. "In a language like Telugu, you could need four to five keystrokes to create a character," says Manoj. He says they are working on the pen-interface or handwriting recognition for recognition systems. Chennai Kavigal also plans to go into the educational sector. "Unless we get into rural India which has a huge (but untapped) market, attempts like this won’t survive," he argues.—TWN |
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IT
looks like Word but it’s in Tamil. You could do spreadsheet work in
this software, and it works in Hindi. Thanks to the initiative of a
young and medium-sized firm in South India, affordable office-based
computing solutions are finding their way to Indian-language computer
users.