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The government’s move to make it mandatory for phone makers to have regional language capabilities seems to be paying off for most brands. Several phone manufacturers are finding that the ability to send messages or read texts in user’s own language is becoming popular.
The Centre had mandated support for Indian languages in all mobile phones to be sold in the country from July 1, 2017 onward. However, the deadline was pushed to 2018 after several large players cited issues around the standardisation of the Brahmi script and storage issues. According to Pankaj Mohindroo, President of the Indian Cellular Association, all phones sold after May 1 are compliant with the government’s order.
“We started rolling out phones with regional language support last November itself. With the kind of target segment we are operating in, a move like this was an obvious step. Now, there are multiple sharing and messaging platforms where interaction happens on a daily basis, so access to regional languages is crucial to increase penetration. On an average we find that Tamil and Malayalam is the most popular on our phones, more than even Hindi,” said SN Rai, Co-Founder and Director of Lava Mobiles.
Nitin Goyal, head of digital services at Intex Technologies, reported that nearly 60 per cent of Intex phone users use regional languages to communicate. Intex phones use an app called ‘Matrabhasha’ that enables access to Indian languages and they report that nearly 87 per cent of its regional language usage comes from Hindi, Bengali,Tamil, Gujarati and Marathi.
A report by KPMG last year showed that nearly 70 per cent of Indian don’t consider English content to be as reliable as regional language content. The same study also shows that most of this regional language usage happens in chatting applications, social media and digital entertainment. Nearly 34.85 per cent of the population in India is projected to be using mobile phones with Internet by 2022, a 45 per cent rise from the current 23.93 per cent.
A significant proportion of this rise comes from regional language users. “We estimate that starting 2019, we will see additional volumes of 4-5 million per month that are driven solely by regional language phone users,” said Mohindroo.
The writer is an intern with BusinessLine
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