Is Indian Language on the net really pathetic?

I got few calls about IAMAI’s report – “Number of Local Language Sites in India stands at a Pathetic 1249!”. I wasn’t able to read this report on the day it was published as I was travelling.

There are parts of the report I agree and disagree with. I contacted IAMAI and IMRB about this report and I must say they have been very supportive and responsive to my concerns (they got in touch with me in less than 15 minutes). I appreciate and thank IAMAI for listening to what I had to say. They have a huge role to play for the language community on the internet. IAMAI asked me to respond to their report.

The report has published the number of sites in each language broken by category. I would like to comment on couple of items only.

• Malayalam should have been included. People tend to ignore a language completely just because it is smaller than the biggest language (Hindi or Tamil). Every language has a user base and if that user base is large enough to monetize it is worth having that language on the web. I believe each of the South Indian languages has a monetizable user base, so we should go for each one of them.
• Telegu should be Telugu. “Religional” should be Regional. Why such casual attitude in preparing the report?
• The report rightly talks about the dismissal usage of languages on State Government sites. They don’t have a clue about the internet and they never will. Governments just refuse to take professional help in developing user friendly sites for their citizens.
• Yes, technology has to get better for users to contribute content (UGC)
  Experts say that approx 70% of Indian surfers will be non-English speaking, so transliteration based editors may not really rock. Most text editors have transliteration which means they need to know English but we got to accept the fact that we have more readers than writers in languages, nothing wrong about it.
• We cannot always compare the size of each language with English on the web.
  Every language has a user base on the net which wants to consume language content and their size varies, for e.g. the size of Tamil internet user base is far higher than Kannada. That doesn’t mean one needs to dump Kannada on the net. The costs needs to be controlled in accordance with the market size.
• The report should have talked about few good examples in the language space
  Economic Times in Hindi and Gujarati are supposed to be very well. Google News has been launched in 5 Indian languages. Both of these giants wouldn’t bother to venture into the language space if it wasn’t promising.
• The report should have highlighted the growth of language usage since 2000.
  Let us not always see the half glass empty and whine. It is high time we have a positive approach to life and see the half full part of the glass. I am not saying the space is fully mature, we need to keep innovating.
• Since language blogs are getting popular I would like to state few facts about the same.

Language Blogs

We at Oneindia.in have a blogs directory and have been concentrating on individual blog posts instead of the entire blogs. We have a decent number of language blogs (Hindi plus 4 South Indian languages) in our directory and are making every effort to increase the numbers.

IAMAI report

	Hindi	Marathi	Tamil	Bengali	Punjabi	Telegu	Kannada	Total
Blogs	394	2	57	57	1	2	4	523

Blogs.Oneindia.in

	Hindi	Tamil	Telugu	Kannada	Malayalam
Blogs	785	2227	295	675	853

I hear from people that there about 4000+ blogs in Tamil and Marathi each. Hindi is far larger. When the language blog population is sizable why was the IAMAI crawler not able to identify more blogs than what they have reported? Which crawler did they use?

It is important to differentiate the reading and writing community. I strongly believe the language reader user base is far larger than the writing user base (UGC) today and it will change over time.

Mobile

There is no mention about language+mobile in the report. The mobile penetration in India is far higher than the internet penetration. The mobile penetration has seen the highest growth in Tier-II cities, which is predominantly non-English speaking. Oneindia.in recognized this fact in 2008 and started publishing its content on its WAP portal (Oneindia.mobi) and by SMS. While our WAP traffic is still small (thanks to the GPRS speed), our SMS user base has grown very impressively. This shows you have a good size of user base that wants to read language SMS.

The UGC contribution on the mobile may be small now but youngsters would figure out a way to communicate in their primary language on the mobile soon. Eterno was one of the first companies that developed a full fledged SMS suite in Indian languages.

What is missing?

• State Governments need to take the lead in developing and distributing platform independent fonts.
• Better text editors which have both transliteration (English phonetic keyboard) and Inscript (common keyboard layout for all languages)
• Search engines need to handle language content a lot better. Search engines are not throwing up good results when it comes to languages, hence many or most sites haven’t yet been discovered. Google has been investing a lot into this space and I am positive about seeing positive results
• Google Adsense needs to work in language, currently it works very well in English. Language portals need better monetization and Google Adsense would be the best bet for language publishers (after all don’t language publishers need food too?)

Conclusion

Indian language on the internet is a reality. There is sufficient content out there which can keep a surfer busy. You have serious sites, personal sites, blogs and entertainment sites. The growth in Internet penetration and better search engines would help the growth of languages on the internet.