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Growth of white-collar jobs in tier-II cities is also driving Web sites to offer content in different Indian languages.
Yahoo is finding the push to tier-II cities so lucrative that it plans to soon start a support facility for many new languages. “We recently launched a Tamil portal. In 2011, we plan to start offering content in five more Indian languages,” Mr Shouvick Mukherjee, Vice-President and Chief Executive officer, Yahoo India R&D, told Business Line .
One bonus for BPOs in tier-II cities is that when an employee joins a BPO company in a tier-II city and exposes his family — especially his younger siblings — to language portals, their general employability goes up. Said Ms Sangeeta Lala, Co-Founder and Vice-President, TeamLease Services, “It will up the scale in terms of overall general awareness. This goes a long way when you are looking for a job.”
She pointed out that though Nokia launched mobiles with Indian keypads over eight years ago, the recent introduction of 3G will fuel further interest in Indian languages.
Browser support
Support for local languages has to come not just from portals but also from browsers, said Mr Sunil Kamath, Sales Director, Opera Software, for India and SAARC. “In Opera Mini, we do the rendering on the server side, so even if a mobile doesn't support language fonts, you can still view it in your local language.” Opera's competitors Firefox and Internet Explorer also have extensive support for Indian languages.
Explaining that this is a trend that is likely to stay, Mr Asheesh Raina, Principal Research Analyst, Gartner, said, “India's population is tech-savvy, but many people are literate only in their local languages. Many companies are trying to capitalise on this.”
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