Local Content For Indian Internet Growth

By Shailaja Neelakantan August 17, 2006 17 Comments

There is a lot of talk about India’s growing dominance in the Indian media these days. The Financial Express says India is, “taking over the world wide web in a big way (and) outpacing the world.”

The recent surge in the growth of Internet connections might back that claim. New numbers from technology research firm comScore Networks that suggest India has 18.02 million Internet users over the age of 15. This makes India the ninth biggest country (up from the tenth in March) in terms of the total online population over the age of 15. India’s Internet users increased 7.8 percent since March and this is higher than the world online population growth of 2.7 per cent for the same period.

Another outfit, the Internet and Mobile Association (IAMAI) of India, is even bolder. They say the country has as many as 38.5 million users over the age of 12. “Our figure does include cyber cafes (in addition to homes and offices),” Subho Ray, president of IAMAI told GigaOM.

But even with those fat totals, the fact remains most of India’s billion people are denied access to the Internet–and not only because they don’t have a connection or a computer. The digital revolution is leaving them behind because they don’t speak English, the dominant language of the Web.

One expert says that the dearth of content in other Indian languages could limit the growth of the number of Internet users in the country. “Growth is almost saturating among English speaking users in India,” Deepak Maheshwari, secretary of the Internet Service Providers Association of India (ISPAI) told gigaom. “It (growth) is a difficult issue to address within the limited domain of English language content,” he said, adding that he is basing his conclusions on estimates that between five and 10 percent of India’s population speaks English. (Estimates of the number of English speakers in India vary widely from 5 percent of the population, or 50 million people, all the way to more than 30 percent, or 350 million people.)

IAMAI’s Ray is more upbeat. “The English speaking population is certainly many times more than 40 million in India and it is in fact growing with an increasing emphasis on English language training in our country,” he says. Moreover, it doesn’t take an MA in literature to navigate the web. Activities like sending an email, uploading a resume, looking for property and booking a ticket among other things can be undertaken without any deep knowledge of English, according to Ray. “Most Indians in urban areas can understand simple instructions such as, “submit” ’send” etc in English,” he says.

Even if there is room for further growth among English-language users in India, far greater growth could be unleashed. Hindi is the world’s third or fourth most widely spoken language. Yet it is not even in the top 10 languages on the Internet, according to InternetWorldStats.com. A recent survey by New Delhi-based online research consultant JuxtConsult showed that 44 percent of the 30,000 odd people it polled preferred sites in Hindi and 25 percent wanted content in other local Indian languages.

Maheshwari believes that not only does there need to be content in local languages, that content must also have local context. “It isn’t enough that a Web site shows me the weather forecast for New York in Hindi. That is not relevant to me if I’m sitting in Kanpur,” he says, adding, that there is a “need to proliferate hosting in the country.” His rationale is that the time lag in accessing something that is on a server in the US is actually a deterrent to a new user who is still trying to figure out how to use the Internet. The challenges in increasing local content, he says, include the standardization of fonts and internationalized domain names, an issue the Indian government is already working on.

In some ways, the Internet content space is like the Indian cable television space of 15 years ago. India started with Star TV’s Star Plus, a channel that showed tripe like “The Bold and The Beautiful.” Now, another channel, Star World, still shows Indians cheesy stuff like Baywatch and the A Team (B&B is still going strong). But Star Plus, the former home of B&B, has shifted to all Hindi content, and most of its programs draw more viewers than B&B or any other U.S. television show. “Once the market push is there, it is not difficult for online businesses to provide services in local languages,” says Ray, adding that having local language software is a more difficult issue to solve.

Some small steps are being taken to increase local language content but it is too early to say whether they have in any way spurred Internet usage. Raftaar, a Hindi language search engine developed by Delhi-based research firm Indicus Analytics, debuted earlier this year, but there needs to be more content in Hindi for it to be of any use.

Local language newspapers have gone online, webduniya.com offers content in Hindi, Tamil, Telugu and Malayalam and a government-led project Vidyavahini, which aims to use the Internet to train teachers and provide educational materials on the Internet, plans to develop content in Hindi, Tamil, Malayalam and Bengali, in addition to English. Also check out Alootechie’s interview with the founders of a Bhojpuri language site!

Photo via Flickr by gdStone.