As per this news Mr.Dayanidhi Maran Hon’ble Cabinet Minister for IT and Commn have announced yesterday that Govt. of India is developing free Indian Language Browser software in next 3 years. Though I don’t see any value in Govt. spending its money just to develop UI in Indian languages (many already exists both from Open Source and from Microsoft), I welcome the subsequent idea. This browser software will be able to translate English based web content (WebSites and Pages) into any of the 13 Indian Languages – this feels a big void that exists today. None of the biggies (including Google or AltaVista) or any Open source project have so far concentrated on this need. Only very few percentage of our population understands English, but majority of the web content is in English and this will be a big blessing to them.
I pray for this effort to be successful – there are too many technical challenges in converting to Indian Language.