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Raja Simhan T.E.

If a local language software has to work in synchronisation with software across the world, it has to follow Unicode standards.

Chennai , Sept. 8

MICROSOFT Corporation India plans to sign memorandums of understanding with some State Governments on localisation initiatives in respective States.

Microsoft would implement applications, including portals in local languages, on Unicode standards.

"We will start with a year's plan on localisation. We will migrate applications from non-Unicode to Unicode standards for free," the company's Programme Manager (Localisation), Mr Raveesh Gupta, told Business Line.

"This is an awareness creation among State Governments on advantages of having Unicode-based applications. We are talking to various State Governments including Uttar Pradesh, Gujarat and Orissa."

Unicode represents characters as integers. The widely used ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Exchange) code uses seven bits for each character while Unicode uses 16.

The latter represents some 65,000 unique characters, ideal for multi-language Indian software, he said.

Microsoft would showcase to State Governments some of its local language e-governance solutions and initiatives.

These include the Bhoomi project in Karnataka, a solution for maintaining land records across the State; the Gyaandoot Project in Madhya Pradesh providing villagers in the State access to latest market information and updates; the NAI Disha Portal and an Online Treasuries Information Solution for the Government of Haryana.

Mr Gupta said that for any local language software to work in synchronisation with software across the world, it has to follow Unicode standards.

"Unfortunately, most Indian developers do not consider this, making it difficult to use their software on a different platform."

For example, if one writes a document in Tamil on software created by a local company, it should open on any other personal computer in the world if sent over mail, without wasting time downloading fonts and configuring systems.

Microsoft, along with all major global players, is a promoter of Unicode to ensure growth in the Indian language-computing platform. There are over 300 Indian developers of local language software, he said.

Since the launch of Windows 2000, Microsoft's first localised offering, Microsoft India has delivered local language enablement for its product offerings.

With the launch of Office XP, Microsoft provided enablement for nine Indian languages: Hindi, Marathi, Sanskrit, Konkani, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Gujarati and Gurumukhi - across all applications - Word, Excel, Power Point, Access, Outlook, FrontPage, he said.

A MAIT-Frost & Sullivan study projects the local language software market to reach revenues of $64 million by 2005 from the present $20 million.

E-governance is expected to account for about 60 per cent of the end-user market in 2005, up from the existing 42 per cent.

The current market size remains limited due to lack of universal standards for scripts and fonts, limited availability of local language software and fonts, and low availability of local language content on the Net, the study said.

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