Wednesday, July 16, 2008

Indian government promotes multilingualism in the internet

The Indian government has called on Indian business to help overcome the internal digital divide by providing Internet access in promoting the use of multilingualism.

In a speech to a workshop on ‘Building an Ecosystem for Internet Governance’, Jainder Singh, the secretary, of the Dept of Information Technology DIT, said "To support millions of rural Internet users under the scheme to create one lakh Common Service Centres in rural India, there was imperative need for innovative solutions, including public-private partnerships and the need for private companies to work with governments and civil society."

He added that IT applications in Indian languages offered enormous scope for reaching out to those who were on the other side of the digital divide. Addressing diversity would lead to the building of an efficient ecosystem in the Internet world.

He said that a redeeming feature of access provision was the growth of mobile phones in India. As the fastest growing cellular market in the world, India, he said, had over 277 million mobile phone users as on June 2008 and the figure was expected to reach 400 million by the end of 2010.

Source: Multi-lingual Internet can bridge the digital-divide (merinews 16/07/08)