The Hindu Business Line : `Go vernacular' is message

Last fall, the Chinese President, Hu Jintao's visit to India was the catalyst in the Indian media for many comparisons between the People's Republic of China and India, now often mentioned in the same sentence as two economic "emerging giants". Industry watchers analysed a wide range of topics: how China accelerated its economy, including the development of tax-free zones, increased domestic R&D, and the proliferation of new technologies, such as wireless communications for the average Chinese citizen.

Focussing on the last, in the mobile market, in a few short years, China's wireless subscribers now number over 450 million or more than at 30 per cent penetration, whereas India is at 150 million, or about 15 per cent. The Chinese subscriber figure is easily more than twice the size of the US and it is an amazing feat for a country with barely 85 million subscribers in 2000 (India reached this figure in 2005, a five-year lag).

Key difference - in SMS space

Yet a key difference exists between the China and India mobile markets - data services, or more specifically, in the volume of SMS, the short text mail service (with 160 characters per message) sent from cell-phones.

This year, US consulting firm Frost & Sullivan estimates that SMS is a world-wide $63-billion revenue stream to about 700 Carriers, representing more than two billion users and a trillion messages per year: right behind mobile voice services, simple SMS is the world's second largest mobile application market.

According to the Ministry of Information Industry of China, Chinese cell-phone users in 2005 sent more than 300 billion SMS messages, a 300-fold increase over the figure for 2000 (when the figure reached 1 billion). In 2006, the average Chinese user sent 50 SMS per month or about 600 a year (there are probably very active users sending twice this number).

During the four years between 2001 and 2004, the SMS annual total volume amounted to 18.9 billion, 90 billion, 137.1 billion and 217.7 billion, respectively. This is contrasted to the figure of 12.3 billion SMS sent by all Indian subscribers in 2004 according to Web portal Mobile Pundit, and although this is projected to grow to 180 billion in 2010 when the total number of Indian subscribers will probably be near the 350-400 million figure (this is still a bit more than half of the total SMS number sent in China last year with a subscriber level lower than 400 million), there are reasons - listed below - that stand in the way of increasing the SMS traffic in India.

Big vs small volumes

It is worth noting that in China, the heaviest traffic volume of SMS occurs during the October "Moon Festival" and February "Lunar New Year" weeks (probably 12 billion were sent just for this New Year's period) when seasonal greetings are sent to one's family, friends, colleagues, and business contacts, similar to the SMS greetings exchanged during "Diwali", the Festival of Lights celebrated in India. This shows the similarity between the two but the question is: why is the Chinese SMS volume many times more at a similar mobile subscriber total count compared to India?

Towards one `Chinese'

Comparing Chinese and Indic languages, although China from an Indian perspective may seem unified as "one" Chinese nation-state with one Chinese language, there are many Chinese dialects that are incomprehensible to each other. For example, a native Mandarin-speaker (with five tones in his speech) will not be able to follow the seven tones of a Cantonese speaker, and vice-versa (there are Fujian, Shanghai, Szechuan dialects, each linguistic group with more speakers than the population of a small European nation).

The development of Chinese characters followed this linguistic conundrum: if people pronounced words differently, they would write (using, say, an Latin alphabet) words differently and there would be mass confusion - unless there was a common set of ideograms that could be pronounced in any way the speaker wished, but the meaning was inherently the same.

Since the People's Republic of China was established in 1949, literacy (and also Mandarin as the national language) was a top objective of the Communist government (although many still speak their own dialects in their community), as well as writing Chinese in a standard Romanised fashion called Pinyin.

Therefore, everybody educated in China would write the capital of China as "Beijing" (in the Pinyin system). With a very high literacy rate (all Chinese learn how to write characters by stroke order) and standardised Pinyin, the Chinese could readily "assemble" Chinese characters for words and phrases.

And with Chinese a predictive text product in cell-phones to simplify mobile texting, they embarked happily into the world of SMS to communicate with family and friends.

Scene in India

The history of Indian wireless points to the higher-income urban areas for the first networks.

Even now, current subscribers are mainly located in major cities (New Delhi has over 33 per cent mobile tele-density while Chennai and Mumbai are 28 per cent and 26 per cent, respectively), yet the story of the last two years has been fast growth in "B" and "C" metro areas or smaller cities and towns located in States such as Kerala, Bihar and Rajasthan.

These new subscribers are different from the English-savvy IT professionals in Mumbai, Chennai or Kolkata, or even in New Delhi and Bangalore. The key differentiator is in Indic "vernacular languages".

The number of "mother tongues" or languages spoken at home or among family, relatives and friends in India was initially estimated to be as high as 1,652 (1961 census) but was reduced to 216 by the Census of 2001. India has 18 official languages (2001 India Census) and each language has its own unique script and alphabet.

For example, according to the same Census, Hindi is spoken by 40 per cent of the population, and the number of script/alphabet is 11 vowels and 34 consonants; Bengali is spoken by 8.3 per cent of the population, Telugu by 7.9 per cent, Marathi at 7.5 per cent, Tamil at 6.3 per cent, Urdu at 5.1 per cent, Gujarati at 4.8 per cent, and Punjabi at 2.8 per cent.

Why is the list of Indian vernacular languages crucial to the understanding of the growth of SMS in India - dubbed `the cheapest, quickest, easiest form of peer-to-peer mobile communication ever known and is still growing in all regions'.

From1999/2000, in SMS traffic for carriers such as Vodafone and Orange, Western Europe was explosive, and this text messaging application was the foundation for using the mobile phone for games and other entertainment, photos, and information.

Indian Carriers looking at the European experience have frustratingly tracked VAS revenue as not rising despite increase in subscriptions - numbers are not automatically translating to more revenues.

The Indian sub-continent resembles a "mini-Europe", a patchwork of linguistic regions, from Hindi in the northern "heartland" swathe that includes Jaipur, New Delhi, Lucknow and Bhopal to Bengali in the east (anchored by sprawling Kolkata) to Tamil spoken around the southern city of Chennai to Marathi in Mumbai's financial hub and Pune in Maharashtra. The overlooked fact is that India's literacy rate has been increasing - from 52.3 per cent (1991 Census) to over 65.4 per cent (2001) - an addition of 182 million literate Indian citizens.

Predictive text software

How does a Carrier transform a shopkeeper in Lucknow, a city of the "Hindi Heartland" to keep in touch via texting with his Hindi-speaking relatives in New Delhi?

A key barrier to SMS growth in India is the lack of handsets embedded with predictive text software in vernacular languages, as well as the lack of awareness, education, and promotion programmes. For vernacular Indian languages listed above, with a higher number of characters (the English alphabet has only 26 letters), using multi-tap method is very tedious: the higher number of characters in the alphabet required to be mapped on phone keys, so there are more key presses, more frustration for our Hindi shopkeeper. According to the Indian Institute of Information Technology (IIIT) at Hyderabad, the Indian vernacular languages have more characters and alphabet, hence longer words on average.

(For example, the average length of words for Malayalam is 10.2, Tamil 8.6, Telugu 7.8 and Marathi 6.3. English averages only about 5 letters per word).

To type "Namaste" (Hello in Hindi) multi-tap (searching for the character in sequence) the number of key presses required is 21. In T9 predictive text, the number of key presses for this same Hindi word is only six. T9 Version 7.2 and higher allows users to toggle between Hindi and English without switching formats - in reality, most users mix English with their vernacular language and vice-versa.

Again reflecting the value of vernacular languages, in a recent survey conducted by Continental Research, overall 65 per cent of Indian people queried want to type text messages in their own language (and not in English).

Handset users in the southern regions of India show greater interest for T9 in their mother tongue.

Nearly four-fifths in the western region are interested in a T9 option for their mother tongue.

Like China's experience, SMS will be the "killer non-voice application " for India.

Also, SMS is the foundation for a wide range of new mobile applications on more expensive and sophisticated handsets, identical to evolutionary patterns in Western Europe, Japan, South Korea and other countries.

The faster there is SMS uptake, the faster there will be mobile commerce, entertainment and education - this is the great promise for the Lucknow shopkeeper and his family.

The author is head of the Emerging Markets Group for Tegic Communications/AOL Wireless.

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