The Hindu : Tamil Nadu / Chennai News : Slew of measures for pervasive spread of ICT

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Saturday, Dec 10, 2005

Tamil Nadu

Tamil Nadu - Chennai

Slew of measures for pervasive spread of ICT

Staff Reporter

Stress to be on low-cost computers, language computing

CHENNAI: The Centre plans to stimulate the penetration of ICT (Information-Communication Technologies) through various measures, including bringing down the cost of computer further, promoting language computing and speech technologies, according to Dayanidhi Maran, Union Minister of Communications and Information Technology.

Addressing the "Entrepreneurs' Partnership Summit" attended among others by Bill Gates, Microsoft chairman and chief software architect, Mr. Maran said after developing a personal computer for less than Rs.10,000 "sooner than we hoped for, we are now looking to lower the bar further." Noting that the Indian consumer in this sector is very price sensitive, he said reducing the cost of PCs further would help "more people find value money in IT."

Likewise, taking note of the importance of affordable language computing for "pervasive spread of ICT," the Ministry of Communications and Information Technology had launched the Indian Language Technology Mission earlier this year, he said. Under the mission, seeking to promote "ICT culture and bridge the digital divide," all basic language technology computing tools were being provided free of cost by the government. "We started with Tamil and then followed it up with Hindi and Telugu," he said, pointing out that the Ministry would progressively cover all the other languages in the mission within a few months.

With only five per cent of its population speaking and in a position to understand English, "India is a perfect crucible for development of linguistic cross platform for machine-aided translation, optical character recognition and multi-lingual data mining," Mr. Maran said.

Stating that he had heard Mr. Gates talking about the importance of speech technologies, the Minister said India was actively pursuing research in this area related to Indian languages. "Companies have started producing a variety of language technology products... we share the global dream of the wealth of knowledge on the web being accessible to people in a language of their own choosing," he added.

He thanked Mr. Gates for his commitment to India in some of the most vital sectors, which includes his recent announcement to invest $1.7 billion in R and D, education and innovation centres. Such investments, Mr. Maran said, fuelled the robust growth of the ICT sector. With the "deepening, widening and intensifying" presence of the services sector globally and the emergence of the country as a strong R and D base, India was "fully equipped to take its rightful place in the global ICT space," he said.

The Minister also detailed the initiatives taken by the government to promote e-governance, including setting up of the State Wide Area Networks for providing reliable broadband connectivity to rural areas.

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