Slashdot Mirror
Indian Government Goes For Free Software
Geekonomical writes "Economic Times has an article that says Indian Government's Department of IT is going to encourage Linux and OSS on all fronts including college education! The article has more details (eventhough it has a misleading title!) The reasoning being more of plain economics than security or other reasons."
However, things are changing now. There is a lot more media coverage on "Free" software and its advantages. Computer Magazines in India have been distributing Linux CDs for a long time now, so the level of Linux knowledge is increasing. There are LUGs in a number of cities in India.
The reason to be skeptical of this initiative is that Microsoft has traditionally invested heavily in India, and Indian politicians love to be seen with Bill. And the widespread corruption doesnt help either.
I mean with no offince once or ever how many people out of that 1,000,000,000 have phone, computer, internet, 60" tvs, sattlite tv with 500 channels and what ever other junk that we all crave
India has a large middle-class and many wealthy people (even some extremely weathly people). But for argument, let's say that 5% are as wealthy as your average American. That's 50 million people. You think that's trivial?
Pakistan too says that it will use Linux. An article at paknews.com talks about that. This is inspite of the fact that Microsoft is offering a 90% discount to the pakistan Government.
So? You don't actually believe that the combined economies of two of the most populous countries on Earth is somehow smaller than that of two countries (North America is the U.S.A and Canada). Do you?
Actually they are not two of the most populous countries on Earth. They are the two most populous contries on Earth. But the U.S.A. economy alone do outstrip the combined economy of these two countries. You second comment however is right on spot, their economy is growing a lot faster and will eventually become the worlds largest economies.
Don't read too much into this. What the article does *not* tell you is that it appeared as headlines the day after Bill Gates announced his visit to India in November.
While India is *extremely* strong on the OpenSource front, it is not unreasonable to expect that this particular news item (which isn't one - it doesn't state anything new) sets the stage for some (fairly common) government-level arm twisting. Remember Peru?
Don't get me wrong - I know what the "DIT" (actually Ministry of Information technology, but who has time to nitpick) is doing, and it is heading in the right direction, and pushing hard for open standards and open technologies.
It is just that this particular article does not appear to to be related to their efforts. Also note that this appears to be more of a commercial booster - the government has done nothing to interact with the astonishingly large OpenSource user base in India, which is sad.
You aren't remembered for doing what is expected of you
English is understood by "most" Indians who frequent slashdot.u ,
But there are *at least* 15 languages in India(_not_dialects_) whose speakers exceed English speakers in India.
To name a few:
Hindi,
Tamil,
Gujarati,
Malayalam
Telug
Bengali,
Marathi,
etc.
Most Indians - (not most Indians in the US, not most Indians on slashdot, not most Indian programmers) - most Indians don't know English.
There appear to be so many Indian programmers because despite being a miniscule percentage, 2% of 1 billion is still a huge number.
Not having software applications in the local languages is only going to increase the digital divide in India.
China's population is higher than India, and the Chinese use Chinese for computing.
In order of number of speakers of languages, the highest is Chinese, followed by English, and next comes Hindi.
Do you know how many websites there are in Hindi? Less than 500.
And Chinese? More than 10,000 and growing.
Now, please don't conclude that this is because the Chinese don't understand English and Indians do. That's specious reasoning.
The Indians who don't know English are denied a lot, that includes computing tools.
Can't see Hindi?
AFAIK, Linux has already been introduced in univs. In Mumbai University, for the first year of Engg. (common across all branches), there is a compulsory course "C on Linux". The adoption rate has been slow (people are still unfamiliar with linux, I recently helped the lab assistant in our college to setup Redhat) but now Linux is being made a option for other courses too, even in the final year.
Let me give an example:
...
In order to get a railway reservation in India, you have to go to the Booking office, stand in a line, wait for your turn(could take anywhere from 30 to 120 min), and get your ticket. Yes, the ticket system is networked nationwide, you can buy a ticket from A to B from any booking office, that may be located in C.
Recently the government(owns the Railways in India, and it happens to be the world's 4th largest network) started online railway ticket booking.
The people who book online, have an advantage of 30 to 120 minutes over the ones who don't - they don't need to stand in the line and wait, while someone ahead of them can book on the same train and deny them a ticket.
The trouble is, the website's interface is in English; whereas in the booking office, the forms can be filled in the local language - they're bilingual.
So, the English speakers not only get the ticket without having to stand in line, they also get an (unfair) advantage because they know English, they're more likely to get the ticket, or will have a earlier position in the waiting list.
Now, if the same interface was also there in the local languages, wouldn't people be eager to use it? You don't need to buy a computer to access the web, cyber cafe charges are ~40c an hour, so on spending 15 minutes in the cybercafe, you would spend the same amount as for when you go to the booking office.
So, a supply side pressure, as you rightly put it, may not always increase demand, but it's things like these
Can't see Hindi?
Is it not racist but is could border on religionphobic.
It is not all india that holds cows sacred, or don't believe in eating meat, just certain religion followers, and they don't care about the race of the belivers.
I completely agree with you. I hail from India. Almost all my friends back home in India are doing CS as a major and i am sorry to say that Linux/*NIX has hardly made any inroads. Infact, i will go one step further and say that computers themselves are not as widely used as they ought to be for obvious monetary reasons.At a college rated amongst the better engineering colleges of Mumbai(new name for Bombay), one of my friends, went through an entire semester of C programming without sitting at a computer. With such money crunches, colleges should consider Linux as a blessing at it cuts them a lot on licensing costs. However, most colleges in India dont have professors knowledgeable about *NIX to be able to conduct courses in that environment. It will be some time before Linux makes any significant inroads in India, but once it does, India does have the potential to become a very large linux user base.
-- Reality is just an extended dream.
The problems faced are lack of free opentype fonts(preferred for handling numerous ligatures & glyphs & their substitution), support for opentype fonts at the X-level. No, indix(linked by another user) won't solve the issue atleast in the present form, since it breaks a lot of X-protocols. Pango holds promise, but it is not being adopted by QT & it will take some time for rendering engines of all indic languages for Pango to be developed.
The plus side is serious efforts are being made to resolve the issue. OT Fonts are available for a few indic languages & existing ttf's are being converted into otf's,Gnome & KDE translation work is going on (some like my own mother tongue 'kannada' is being translated on WinXP) for some indic languages like hindi,kannada, tamil(one of the first indic languages to be translated), etc.,
The things that we should be alarmed is Microsoft's is on the upper hand: It has OT font's for all indic languages besides input engines, OTF rendering support & BillG who is making his 3rd visit to India has already signalled the need for localisation. And if i am not wrong the fonts have been developed with the aid of the local govt. And they are not in public domain or atleast freely usable on linux.
For more details, see: Indic computing mailing lists-search the indic_computing_devel mailing list for extensive criticism of indix & also the kde 18n mailing list. indlinux,kannada mailing list
Btw, here's another example of MS cosying upto the karnataka govt. The bhoomi s/w(up for this year's stockholmn tech award) may cost nearly 40 lakhs per taluk. A NGO, I currently am in touch with was successful in persuading the officials to look at the possibility of developing it on linux. And projects like this need indic support urgently.
Your worst nightmare may be coming true. And remember that karnataka(of which bangalore is it's capital) has the largest no. of engineering colleges, that's a coup. But most of the faculty in the top univ's & college's are atleast aware of linux & it is not entirely discouraging. And thanks to the LUG's it is being noticed, even if not extensively used. Heck, In my college, Me & one of my friends, both commerce graduates had more knowledge of linux than the CS guys. And in most colleges in my city, it is the vocal minority like us that has played a big role in popularising linux. Actually the crackdown on piracy will encourage the move to linux, since most of the educational institutes are using pirated stuff. I know some colleges which have started teaching Staroffice in bangalore. Maybe, if something like the dotcoms happened to linux, it would gain some attention, atleast among the 'where's the next big $ coming from?' kind of people.
I'm sorry if I misunderstood you.
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The percentage of English speaking Indians is not 2%. But quite close.
http://www.victorianweb.org/post/india/hohentha
English in India -- and Who Speaks English to Whom and When?
Annika Hohenthal, Department of English, University of Turku, Finland
In terms of numbers of English speakers, the Indian subcontinent ranks third in the world, after the USA and UK. An estimated 4% of the Indian population use English; although the number might seem small, out of the total population that is about 35 million people (in 1994)(Crystal 1995:101). Although the number of speakers of English in India is somewhat limited (as compared to the total population), that small segment of the population controls domains that have professional prestige (Kachru 1986a: 8).
Those are 1995 statistics, so you might add a few million to the 35 mil. mentioned above.
4% of 1 billion still leaves 960 million in the lurch.
The literacy rate of India is
http://www.cyberjournalist.org.in/census/cenl
(takes time to load)
65.38%. (2001 census statistics)
This means,
60% of the population, ie 600 million literate people in India are denied the use of computers and internet services(note that I distinguish between programmers and the users of the programmers because they don't know English.
These are the figures.
These 600 mill are the ones I'm drawing attention to.
Can't see Hindi?
Indian Linux is your answer. The website says it will be developed in all 18 official Indian languages.
Might be slightly misleading of course; I'm presuming they really meant all 10 ISCII ("Indian Standard Code for Information Interchange") alphabets in transmutation to give, I don't know, 12 or so languages. Will be interesting to see if they later provide for transcribing the Arabic script as well; the website at present seems to be suggesting only native Indian scripts. Not to accuse them of ethnic bias; I'm pretty sure it's plain intellectual laziness.
A More Detailed Explanation:- Hindi, Sanskrit, Marathi and Nepali use the Devnagri script; a few languages such as Konkani, Manipuri use the Roman script and scripts of other languages. Sindhi, Kashmiri and Urdu use the Arabic script (or modifications of it thereof). Unicode doesn't recognise the Assamese script to be different from the Bengali one, but provides for two additional Assamese-only characters; not sure if ISCII does that as well. (IndLinux's page gives seperate keymaps for Assamese and Bengali; I neither speak nor read these languages, so I don't know if they are significantly distinct.) All other languages, namely, Gujarati, Oriya, Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam and Kannada have their own unique scripts.
Tamil is way ahead in implementation though; the Tamil Linux group is very active; the website says you can use Tamil in Mandrake 9.0. Can't read Tamil myself, but the KDE snapshots provided look extremely cool to me.
More than mere navel gazing.
This won't work for McDonald's, because a cheeseburger is stale if you ship it (and because the shipping is higher than the difference), but why not for software or consumer electronics? I'm surprised this hasn't become the standard way to buy stuff.
People do do this, it's called the "grey market". The EU say it's illegal, but retailers are doing it anyway.
I guess with software, you might only sell localized versions overseas which would be useless in domestic markets. IIRC, the licence you get with certain products only allows it to be used in the territory in which it was bought (someone told me this when we were thinking of going into the grey market to supply just-released Apple Powerbooks to Europe).
I'd like to get some of the gadgets they get in Asian markets that never make it to the West; if you could get them at bargain prices because of currency exchanges, so much the better!
There's no reason you can't do this, unless import tarriffs make it economically unfeasible. If there was a good economic case, I'm sure the Asian companies would be doing it already.