Google launches alliance to promote Indian languages on Internet

Google India on Monday announced the creation of the Indian Language Internet Alliance (ILIA), a group committed to promoting the growth of Indic language content online. ILIA, created in partnership with leading Indian technology and content companies, hopes to turn 300 million Indian language speakers into active internet users by 2017.

Launching the alliance, minister for information and broadcasting Prakash Javadekar said the adaptive style and skills of Indians have successfully ensured the perfect blending between technology use and the masses at large.

''The Indian mindset with its ingrained adaptive skills ensured the prolific use of technology across different sectors. The widespread use of internet and mobile phone was a good instance of technology blending with the needs and requirements of people related to information use,'' Javadekar said.

The minister launched the website `www.hindiweb.com', the first initiative of the alliance, which would be a platform for Hindi speaking internet users to discover Hindi content across websites, apps, videos and blogs.

Javadekar said the new initiative would expedite good quality online-content generation in Indian languages and would provide an inclusive platform for non-English speaking users to break language-barriers and access online information easily.

The alliance has Network 18 as one of the founding members and is represented by IBN Khabar and MoneyControl Hindi. It would work together in building Indic language content for hundreds of millions of Indians who will be coming online for the very first time, mostly via smart phones and mobile devices, Google said.

Currently, there are over 200 million internet users in India, about 16 per cent of its population of 1.2 billion.

"Our mission at Google is to ensure the world's information is universally accessible, and this includes the millions of users in India who are about to come online for the first time," Amit Singhal, Google's senior vice president of search, said

Hindi Voice Search will be just one of the many steps Google is taking to empower the Indian language users and advertisers to take advantage of the web's huge economic and social potential, he said.

Practically all of the country's English-speaking population of 198 million is already online. The remaining 90 per cent of Indians, who are not online, tend not to be English speakers.

''Google is very committed to bringing new internet users online in India,'' Rajan Anandan, vice president and managing director, Google India, said.

''Through the Indian Language Internet Alliance, we want to help content creators to act now and build relevant content for these new Indian language mobile users," he said.

The ILIA members include ABP News, Amar Ujala Publications Ltd, C-DAC, DB Digital, Firstouch, HinKhoj, Jagran Prakashan Ltd, LinguaNext Technologies Pvt. Ltd, NDTV, Network 18, Oneindia.com, Patrika Group, Process Nine Technologies Pvt Ltd, Prost Innovation Pvt Ltd, Reverie Language Technologies Pvt Ltd, Times Internet Ltd, Ver Se Innovation/ NewsHunt, and Webdunia.com in addition to Google.