The Hindu Business Line : India needs multilingual Net to reach out to its billion

Most of India’s people are denied access to the Net because they do not speak English, the dominant language of the Web. Relevant content in the local language would enable wider use of the Internet in rural India.

Rural school-kids learning how to use the Internet… No problem with the technology but what about the language?

G. Srinivasan

For the first time in Asia, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), designed to oversee Internet’s addressing system, was holding its five-day meeting in New Delhi that began on February 11.

Considering that India and Asia are at the heart of the Internet’s future, as stated by ICANN’s Board Chairman, Mr Peter Dengate Thrush, the deliberations of this conclave are significant for their focus on specific issues and popularising the Internet among millions on the Asian continent.

Private-public partnership

As a classic case of private-public partnership, ICANN was created through a memorandum of understanding between the US Department of Commerce and ICANN to make over the management of the Domain Name Systems (DNS) from the US government to the global community. This is crucial because the Internet is an open, worldwide network that interconnects computer networks using a host of standardised protocols in order to allow the exchange of data among them.

Internet Root Servers are part of the DNS, a worldwide distributed database that is used to translate worldwide unique domain names such as www.mit.gov into other identifiers. They are of an ‘any-cast’ nature and are mirror-servers. The DNS is an important part of the Internet because it is used by well-nigh all Internet applications. These root-servers are managed and operated by a very competent and trusted group of volunteers.

With India cruising on the knowledge economy highway, leveraging its inherent advantages in information technology and abundant, top-notch technical manpower, Internet Access, Domain Names and Internet Address Space have become the major instrument for socio-economic development.

Internet Protocol Addresses (IP Addresses), their allocation, management, equitable distribution and control policies have, hence, assumed high importance in the scheme of things for global economies vying for a role in handling the IP Address Space.

Though rooted in technical standards, the Internet is no more than a standard for network communication that rides over the ability of people at the fringes of the network to sway and create the content of what is flowing through it, making it international in nature. Its gradual ascendancy through the intense involvement of governments, private enterprise, civil society, technical people and academia and a host of stakeholders makes it almost indispensable in day-to-day life.

Interestingly, the Internet access points have outgrown the traditional PC-based Internet browsers (Internet Explorer, Firefox) to desktop applications, mobile phones and satellite navigational devices in vehicles and living rooms. Search processes have transformed from keywords to contextual search, vertical search, image search and social search, so much so that before long real-time video will be far more widely used for buying, communicating, learning and socialising.

The line between private and public life, especially of the younger generation, has blurred with online chat and blogs and cyber-cafes taking over from pubs and bars for socialising, even cutting across borders, copyrights, censorships and network blocking.

Web navigation is very facile and activities like sending an email, uploading a resume, looking for property and booking a ticket can be conducted with a smattering of English; most Indians in urban and many rural areas understand simple instructions such as ‘submit’ and ‘send’. No wonder India stands fifth in the total number of Internet users with 42 million, or a 3.6 per cent share of world Internet users.

India’s Net divide

But Internet penetration in India is yet to become as ubiquitous as cell phones and cable TV. Even as the cell-phone has touched the lives of the rich and poor alike, evening out the social divide, one cannot often find a cab driver and a college student sitting across from each other to check mail in a cyber café.

While this has something to do with opportunity cost entailed in spending time in cyber cafes, the lack of services to target a large part of India is the main factor. The Internet too largely uses American Standard Code for Information Interchange (ASCII), alienating many communities from the larger gains of computers and the Net.

The simple fact is that most of India’s billion people are denied access to the Net because they do not speak English, the dominant language of the Web. It is a known proposition that the content has to be in a language that is understood by most of the users.

In the Internet space, this is highly unbalanced. Twelve out of the 6,000 popular languages spoken globally account for 98 per cent of Web content, with English dominating, even as efforts are underway to provide user-friendly tools for language-independent search and retrieval and machine translation of text from English to another language, and vice-versa.

A multilingual Internet would whet local interest in Net content and augment the possibilities for all language groups to share and access information in their vernacular. But the challenge in increasing local content includes the standardisation of fonts and Internationalised Domain Names (IDNs), an issue the Indian government is seized of and working on. There needs to be relevant content in the local language, such as price of crops for farmers, and weather conditions for farmers and fishermen to enable wider use of the Internet in rural India. There are more than 850 living languages in India, of which 22 are official languages.

One of the areas of ICANN is the introduction of IDNs. Already, 13 language test names have been introduced by ICANN, which include Devanagari and Tamil scripts. The numbers of IDNs per territory must be based only on this criterion and no other, as IDNs are being brought for the benefit of those communities who do not understand English.

Domain names

ICANN’s proactive role in inclusion of other Indian languages through launch of IDNs would be helpful for India.

Officials in the Department of Information Technology have said that in the ongoing meeting, India would demand an early automation of IANA (Internet Assigned Numbers Authority execution), announcing the process and policies for new TLDs (top-level domains) and deployment of Internationalised Domain Names at the top level, such as country code and generic domain names, so that India could launch IDN in major Indian languages of Hindi, Marathi, Tamil, Malayalam and others at the secondary level.

India is seen as a proud partner of ICANN in its role of maintaining the resilience and performance of root-servers. With ICANN’s instrumentality India has established three root-servers in the country to manage distributed ‘denial of service’ attacks. This has, in turn, cut down expensive global bandwidth load and host name resolution under 10 milliseconds, bringing down the country’s dependence on root-servers abroad.

In sum, India is keeping its fingers crossed that the outcome of discussions during the ongoing meeting would lead to a seamless integrated transfer of technology and expertise across nations, while continuing to keep up a stable and robust Internet with its borderless and dynamically growing global nature and stature intact.

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