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New Delhi , April 25

IN a bid to enhance penetration of computers and Internet in the country, the Government is planning to make it mandatory for original equipment manufacturers (OEM) to load fonts in 23 Indian languages onto the computers sold in the country.

"It (lack of local language computing) is a hindrance in proliferation of computer and Internet. We have to keep in mind that in India less than 5 per cent of the people speak English and therefore we need to make these fonts freely available in our mother tongue," the Minister for Communications and IT, Mr Dayanidhi Maran, said after inaugurating Electronics and Information Technology Exposition (ELITEX) here.

The Ministry has launched a process of dedicating tools, products and resources in Indian languages for public use. As the first step towards this, various Tamil language fonts, e-mail client in Tamil, Spell Checker, Dictionary, Tamil Typing tutor were released in public domain earlier this month. "We will be launching the initiative in 22 other languages, and we will try to finish the entire process in six months. The next language will be Hindi, and we will be releasing it next month," Mr Maran said adding that the Government would make it mandatory for all OEMs to load the fonts and `OpenOffice' on all PCs that are shipped to the country. "It will be free, and it is up to the consumers to use it or delete it," he said.

The fonts will either come pre-loaded on a system or will be handed out in CDs by the OEMs. For companies operating in India it makes sense to do business in Indian languages, he noted. On the proposed Information Technology (IT) Act amendment, Mr Maran said, "An expert committee is going through it and the final proposal will come soon."

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