The Hindu Business Line : Say it in your own lingo

The unique features of the Brahmi Input Method are: it is based on the way all Indian languages are taught — a top vowel row with consonants in sets below; the Matra key is used for the vowel signs and the Halant key for halfconsonants.

COMMUNICATE, with local flavour - K.K. Mustafah

Words come alive in our mother tongue. There are those expressions, phrases, metaphors that sound right only in the language of our town.

Now you will be able to type that exact saying while writing an e-mail, with a keyboard designed for Indians.

Based on the ancient script of Brahmi, the keyboard is being designed for the 95 per cent of Indians who don't know English. This keyboard can be modified to cater to 40 or so modern Indian languages.

Descendants of the Brahmi alphabet include: Bengali, Devanagiri, Gujarati, Gurmukhi, Kannada, Khmer, Malayalam, Oriya, Sinhala, Tamil, Telugu and Tibetan.

A US-based company, Kalibonca LLC, has acquired the rights to license the Brahmi Keyboard, Brahmi Phone Keypad and other input methods based on the Brahmi Layout. Several companies, including Reliance Communications ADAGroup, are evaluating the product for sale to millions of Indians, according to the firm.

"We believe that the Brahmi Input method is the key to cracking the Indian language market as all Indians understand the Brahmi input method intuitively," says a spokesperson.

Invented by Dr Mahesh Jayachandra, the Brahmi keyboard has been licensed by the company.

Kalibonca is currently tying up with computer makers, keyboard vendors and kiosk makers.

This will be useful when rural broadband connectivity is established and villagers look to the Internet to solve their daily problems.

IIT Mumbai's aAqua (almost All QUestions Answered) project, for example, will receive a boost once these keyboards are in use.

The project brings online experts together to solve questions posed by rural denizens.

Most problems are crop-related and the questions are asked in Hindi/Marathi, said Prof Krithi Ramamritham, Dean of R&D, Dept of Computer Science and Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology, Mumbai, speaking at a telecom event in Bangalore recently.

Queries have been received from all parts of India — from the North-East, Kerala and Maharashtra.

According to the experts who designed this, the villagers are unable to articulate their thoughts using the input devices commonly available.

Hence the project uses multimedia — images instead of text, to elaborate on the question. Such a keyboard will boost the amount of content coming from rural India.

This will mean more literature in local languages on the Web — what Jimmy Wales, co-founder of Wikipedia, egged Indians to upload.

There are around 3,000 to 10,000 articles in Bengali, Telugu, Marathi, Tamil and Kannada, with the number of Kannada articles growing at 22 per cent per month and Bengali ones at 35 per cent. There were only 1,000 articles in Hindi on Wikipedia.

Mobile phone to rescue

Meanwhile, mobile phones are also racing into villages and alleviating the economic situation there. With keypads in local languages, mobile users in rural India will have power at their fingertips. C-DAC, Motorola, Infosys and W3C are working on realising this.

"We are focussing on licensing the technology to cell-phone providers," says the Kalibonca spokesperson. The unique features of the Brahmi Input Method are: it is based on the way all Indian languages are taught — a top vowel row with consonants in sets below; the Matra key is used for the vowel signs and the Halant key for halfconsonants.

Also, the keyboard can be bilingual — the user can shift between English and Hindi as required.

Once these various technologies, companies and institutes achieve success, it will spell hope for the rural folk. Hope for better expression, communication and growth.

preethij@thehindu.co.in