Workshop On Empowering The Poor Through Rural Information Centers:

Transcription

1 Workshop On Empowering The Poor Through Rural Information Centers: What Works and What is Sustainable? Monday, December 2, Presentation on Shortage of the Relevant Contents in Indian & Regional Context By Chetan Sharma Founder & CEO Datamation Foundation, New Delhi (India)

2 Issues :- Acute shortage of relevant local content for all-round, allpervasive needs of the local communities and in the language they understand restricts use of the rural ICT centers. Shortage of local language content forces people to use ICTs predominantly for Chat and . Consequently accessing relevant content becomes a secondary priority. Shortage of local content combined with robust rural connectivity restricts usage of rural ICT centers. Most local content currently available is in the nature of : **complaints and grievance redressal mechanism **information on Govt. programs and schemes

3 application formats for the delivery of the services such as land/property records, driving license, loans and subsidies, tax returns Consequently rural ICT centers end up being multipurpose computer shops serving a wide range of customer needs-- not necessarily information driven. Govt and civil society who can play a catalytic role lack both resources and will to generate locally relevant content. Private sector does not consider local content development a viable business model yet.

4 There is no clear cut accountability on any one to consolidate and aggregate relevant local content for the communities; consequently available local content tends to be scattered, diffused and dated. The community knows its content needs best. Therefore a community is in a better position to generate relevant content by itself provided an organization structure to support the same. The organization structure for local content generation must include : **content initiators **content guides and moderators **group of communities playing the role of an umbrella organization for content generation

5 Long way to traverse before local content transcends being one of Free information on demand to a paid Knowledge sharing Most paper based Govt records and databases suffer due to lack of information sharing driven by connectivity and a constant updation mechanisms. Information sharing between the Govt. Departments itself is very minimal; consequently there is no single source of obtaining relevant local content.

6 Shortage of local content (Some Facts & Figures) South Asia home to nearly one-sixth of humanity is struggling to attain regional language solutions that would make computing accessible to the common man. With improved levels of education delivered mostly in the local languages; the expectations of the consumers for getting relevant local content from all media are very high. Some Indian regional languages are larger than languages spoken by whole countries elsewhere. - Hindi : 366 Million speakers second world wide only to Chinese Mandarin. - Telugu : 69 Million

7 - Marathi : 68 Million - Tamil : 66 Million There are another 13 Indian languages in the top-70 global languages with over 70 million speakers Some Indian languages are also spoken beyond the national boundaries : - Bengali (207 Million speakers in India and Bangladesh) - Urdu ( 60 Million in India and Pakistan)

8 Why local content sharing becomes difficult? Restricted Domains and lack of information sharing Inter-Operability due to technology issues Varied Database Architectures Largely Govt. content continues to remain paper based, handwritten & unstructured. Ownership of the paper based content itself is highly diffused with no clear cut responsibility towards consolidation and aggregation of the content. Content sharing relates to organizational restructuring & administrative reforms which is an uphill task to accomplish. Connectivity in most parts of the country is a major issue impeding content sharing & information transfers.

9 India faces a unique local-language computing standardization and capacity-building problem. Local content and local language computing becomes feasible by the creation of a hierarchy of participatory consortia to facilitate local participation in standardization and development. Internet necessarily is not the best source for the generation of the local content due to low access to the Rural ICT Centers, PCs and poor band width. Innovative deployment of community radio and internet radio help generate relevant local content with a greater chance of dissemination amongst the communities. (Reference : The Kothmale Community Internet Radio Project, Sri Lanka supported by UNSECO)

10 Shortage of local language content Technical difficulties : Each language needs its differences to be taken care of. A high quality editor that supports Unicode is the prime requirement. Users have difficulty in using, saving, printing documents in the local languages. Ability to share files with others, read, send s and opportunity to browse and search the net in local languages is seriously hampered currently. There is much debate about the role of the open source in local content development; yet effective usage of open source in local content has not started happening yet.

11 There is no Font-Encoding Standard. Until font Management and rendering are standardized, all applications run differently for input and output with great effort. Localization files are needed to create user interfaces. Only Microsoft s WINXP has any kind of Indian language support worth speaking about. However this is also based on the current Unicode version (3.X) and unable to represent all the characters of most Indian Languages. Unicode version (3.X) makes text processing very awkward. Support for Indian languages in the Open-Source OS is today confined to a series of ad-hoc solutions.

12 Shortage of local language content Possible Solutions and Challenges :- Free standards group together with LII8nux.org are proposing to rationalize and simplify local content usage under open source including common rendering engine, shared font paths and other standards that will greatly simplify the business of supporting all writing systems and all languages. However GN4/LINUX depends on the volunteers and external financial support. Initiatives such as Free Software Foundation of India need tremendous boost.

13 Since principal technical problem is in rendering, conjuncts without proper rendering engines and properly encoded fonts. However fonts with appropriate tables giving the possible character sequences and the glyphs for rendering each character, and an engine that knows how to read the tables are under evolution. For desktop class machines, current font technology (TTF, Open type Type1) etc are capable of handling Indic Scripts. However display technology for Embedded devices (Mobiles, hand held devices) for Indian languages are in their infancy currently. Great problem with type-setting of technical documentation particularly in the discipline of Maths, Physics and Chemistry. Collation (Sorting) is a big problem and one has to resort to constant standardization.

14 Non-Availability of dictionaries and thesaurus in the Indian languages.and issues arising out of multiple correct spelling for words need attention. Encoding standardization (Unicode) that will facilitate transliteration between various Indian languages program support ( Database, Spreadsheet) for searching/sorting twobyte string. In short-term, working towards developing the existing packages in a manner that people can use them with freedom from OS s and fonts is needed. More and more trans-literation software needs to be used. Till Unicode happened, there was complete lack of standards of input, storage and output of data.

15 Fonts are a complete mess. Most of the current implementation rely on glyph locations to display and store information. For instance to represent the letter a what is stored is the position of a in some fonts; unlike in normal English where the ASCII standard specifies usage of number 65. No such standards exists for Indian languages hence one document written in one language can not be opened in another application without adjusting the fonts. Mandatory fonts in web pages have to be used. The information needed to implement local language computing support needs to be made widely available so that whoever is interested.. be it Czech or any Scandinavian language can add to the language computing support.

16 Role of community radio, internet telephony, chat and bulletin board in the local content generation needs to be re-evaluated. Multilingual development framework needs to be deployed to help deal with the complexity of managing the development of multilingual applications.

17 Thanks!!!!!