Pune, August 2, 1998

A workshop-cum-seminar on the trail blazing multilingual computing technology, "GIST WEEK", was held at Chennai, Bangalore and Hyderabad from 26th May to 30th May, 22nd June to 27th June and 27th July to 1st August respectively.

In this educative awareness program, the decision makers from institutions belonging to government, banking, communication, information, powers, energy, education, telecom, science and technology sectors stressed on the use of computers in Indian languages. They also stressed the issue of using Indian language computing at offices as a top priority in the computerization process.

According to their comments the following issues are pertinent to implementing multilingual technology.

• Computerization is necessary to achieve the productivity and competitive edge over the international competition; and standardize the domestic business particularly in public service sectors like banking, telecom, railways, postal, power etc. The diversified customers, their geography and their different communication languages, compel service industry very much to implement the local language as the interface in the process of computerization. The necessity to compute in regional or local languages is to make the estimated 90% of population conversant with computer in their mother tongue rather than in English.
• Multilingual computing is the need of the hour when our country has the vision of building the National Information Infrastructure (NII). Local language interface can make the job easier for an individual to access and avail the facilities expected to be offered under the NII.
• It has been observed worldwide that minority language scripts are gradually romanized and have become nonexistent and have became just part of the history. In view of fast growing phenomena of Internet there could be a serious threat to Indian heritage scripts which holds minority against English. By digitizing all Indian heritage scripts and bringing them in real-life-electronic use they could be safeguarded from losing their identity.
• Multilingual computing can play a major role in betterment of existing social and citizen facilitation services such as transport, hospital, electricity, telecom, banking, municipal, education and literacy program etc. In India only 7 to 8 per cent of the population is conversant with English. Rest is totally dependent on the local languages and is the major hurdle in computer proliferation drive. The development of multilingual computing technology has reduced the dependency on English. The big beneficiaries of this technology would be the SOHO (small office home office) segment. Thistrend can be a big boost to the computer technology proliferation. Such trends may redefine the phenomena of information superhighway as Multilingual Information Superhighway.

The GIST WEEK witnessed an enthusiastic participation from 1200 (approx..) computer users from various sectors who got a unique opportunity to get educated about how the Indian language interface, particularly Tamil, Kannada and Telugu, can be used on day-to-day routine job applications at office.