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Mobile phone makers have been given three more months by the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology to embed Indian regional language software in their handsets.
The Ministry had last year ordered that all mobile phones should enable users to text in all Indian languages from July 1 onwards. The deadline for compliance has now been shifted to October 1 after the industry sought more time to get their products certified by the Bureau of Indian Standards. A majority of phone brands have complied with the requirement, but the others blame the delay on the lack of adequate number of certification labs. Pankaj Mohindroo, President of the Indian Cellular Association, said, “The industry is all charged up and ready, but there has been a delay for some reasons.”
The Indian Cellular Association, the industry body representing phone makers, said the dearth of BIS-certified laboratories for language software testing was the major reason for the deadline extension.
The lack of standardisation in the testing procedure and the failure to provide character set specifications had rendered the task of developing and testing software difficult.
Approval awaitedAll the phone brands that BusinessLine spoke to confirmed they were ready with the language capability, but were yet to get BIS approval.
Nitin Goel, Head of Digital Technologies at Intex, said, “We have gone a step further and enabled all our feature phones also with regional languages.”
Getting language capabilities in feature phones is not easy. While smartphones running on platforms such as Android come with in-built capability to text in regional languages, feature phones have limited memory; this makes installing 22 languages difficult.
Akshay Dhoot, CEO of Videocon Handsets, told BusinessLine that Videocon is working on developing a software which can read 22 languages and believes that the three-month extension is time enough to install the languages into its feature phones. If all languages cannot be supported by the software, phones with region-specific languages would be produced and sold in a particular region.
Sanjay Kumar Kalirona, CEO & Director of COMIO brand of phone, said regional languages will hold particular appeal in Tier-1 and Tier-2 cities.” Overall, the manufacturers do not see many problems in complying with the new regulations,” Kalirona said.
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