• PAGE ONE
• INDEX
• HOME

Native lingo on the Net

Kripa Raman

Webdunia.com, which calls itself the world's first Hindi portal, went on the Net last September. Why a Hindi portal in an age when most Internet users in India appear to frequent English Web sites? India Ltd., the company behind Webdunia.com, has a simpl e answer to this question: ``Hindi is the third most frequently spoken language in the world.'' According to the Webdunia team, there are around 300-450 million people in India familiar with Hindi as a language of primary use and it is a giant virgin com munity waiting to be ``captured'' on the Web. Contrast this to the English-speaking population (less than 5 per cent) in India, says young Parvindar Singh Gujral at Webdunia.com (Gujral has been given no designation, in keeping with the trend among a lot of dotcom companies).

It is not the Hindi market alone that Webdunia is looking at. The company has set its sights on the Tamil, Telugu and Gujarati markets as well. Typically, these are the clutch of Indian languages that anybody in the language portals game is looking at. T he Tamil and Telugu communities are better Net-connected than the rest in India as the information technology related professions are the rage in Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu. The people from these states have taken to widespread Internet use and NRIs h ave popularised the Net.

According to Webdunia, the response has been encouraging. This portal claims to be the first to explore ways of going beyond the superficial use of language. ``We offer a Hindi e-mail service called E-Patra, we also have a Hindi search engine called Khoj which we developed ourselves,'' says Gujral. ``We are soon going to digitise Hindi content for the Web.'' A large chunk of its Web site visitors are typically NRIs; around 90 per cent of the Indian users are from the top five or seven cities. Of this 90 per cent, more than 40 per cent are from Mumbai.

But this does not mean that a language portal does not make any business sense in smaller towns too, say people in the language portals game. Webdunia says it is a chicken and egg situation. ``There is nothing being offered to the user in a small town. A nd therefore there is no incentive to him to access the Net. It is imagined that the small-town guy is a poor fellow who cannot afford a computer. There are millions of cash-rich people in small towns who are not very comfortable with English,'' says Guj ral.

In fact, Gujral's partly jokey contention is that in small towns, the only people very comfortable with English are the babus who work as Government servants or as salaried employees for the cash-rich people who do not speak English. ``And these English- speaking people do not have much money while the others who can easily afford computers and connectivity have nothing offered to them on the Net.''

The Indian language market is an untasted and unpicked fruit while the English market is a much-harvested orchard. Fighting for the business-to-consumer space in the limited English language market is also becoming fraught with difficulties and the compe tition cut-throat with the entry barriers going higher and higher.

Typically, people from the Indian language press or other interest groups are the ones who have set up language portals. In fact, most well-known Indian language newspapers have their own Web sites. Webdunia has been promoted by Vijay Chhajlani and his f amily which runs the Indore-based Nai Duniya group of newspapers. Walden International Investment Group (WIIG), an international venture capital firm, and an angel investor have put in around $2.8 millions in Webdunia.

The television industry also plans to diversify into the language portals business, taking a cue from its own experience. (It is often pointed out that every foreign channel had to offer Hindi and later, regional language content to get the Indian eyebal ls, as the jargon goes.) The Star TV-promoted Broadcast Worldwide has struck up an alliance with the Ahmedabad-based publishing group Sandesh Ltd. for programme supply, sales and marketing for the Gujarati channel that Broadcast Worldwide is setting up. Other language channels -- Punjabi, Bengali and Marathi -- are also being planned by Broadcast Worldwide. This is the trend that portals will follow too, say the advertising and marketing industry.

Among the first off the block in India was rediff.com which now offers three Indian language versions: Hindi, Tamil and Telugu. The three languages, says Rediff, (reticent about its plans now that it is in its pre-American depository receipt issue stage) will cover a large part of the Internet-accessing population in the country.

Meanwhile, smaller groups of individuals, motivated by personal interest in their own culture and language, are getting together and setting up language portals or Web sites. A Mumbai-based group of individuals, comprised of professionals such as journal ists, authors, information technology professionals, etc, have set up a Marathi portal called Pratibimb.

UTV Interactive, the newly formed subsidiary of UTV, is planning a number of Indian language portals. It has already launched www.tamizha-tamizha.com, a Tamil portal and kemchho.com, a Gujarati portal. In the next few months, the company will have five d ifferent language portals running, said Biren Ghose, Chief Executive Officer, UTV Interactive. This is a thrust area for the company, apart from the radio and streaming video that it will offer through its portal www.sharkstream.com.

UTV Interactive has already tied up with software houses to offer regional television software on its streaming channel. Sixty per cent of the world users of the Internet are most familiar with a language other than English, says Ghose. UTV Interactive w ould only be doing what the parent company is most familiar with. ``Entertainment and culture are going to be the biggest drivers of community building on the Net,'' says Ghose. There is a great opportunity to address regional or language communities. An d regional vortels are one of our focus areas.'' And the revenue models are not merely advertisement-based, say regional portal promoters. ``We are going to focus on e-commerce, perhaps focus on festivals, we have thought about puja packs, classifieds, m atrimonials. We are going to provide separate chat rooms for a fee and so on,'' says Ghose.

And yes, everybody wants to offer shopping malls, medical advice, travel guides, the works.

The regional sense of belonging is so strong that Webdunia's E-Patra has 1,25,000 users, says the company and claims three million page views for its portals. Many of them are NRIs who ``are longing to use their language''. Sometimes, the reasons for usa ge may be less of sentiment and more to communicate on practical details with friends or relatives back in India, for instance. But that is only the beginning, hope these portals which aim at making the regional Indian population their mainstream target audience.

Every one of these regional Web sites claims they are not recycling English material for their audiences. They claim they have their own news teams and separate outfits to run the regional language portals. Says Jyoti Shukla who edits the Hindi rediff.co m. ``We have people who write in from small places in Madhya Pradesh to people who write in from Germany.'' The drama section of the Gujarati Rediff version even offers ticket bookings online.

Every regional portal comes with its dollop of religion, festival and astrology-related offers. During Diwali, Webdunia offered the entire standard prayer and puja routine online. Last year, they sent free rakhis on behalf of their users when requested. Rediff offers spiritual counselling from online guide `Maharaj Pramukhswami'.

Other specialist portals are addressing the language issue as well. Indiagames.com, which calls itself the first Indian gaming portal, is developing Hindi versions of its games. The portal, aimed at the very young, only delivers Indian games developed in -house. One example is a Hindi version of its game modelled on the Ramayana which even starts with an introduction to the epic and actually follows the epic narrative in its sequences in `shudh' Hindi. The games are offered online using video streaming t echnology and are also sold offline in CD-Rom form.

Yoddha, a game the company is developing, is going to be India's first 3-D game in the category of Doom and Quake, says Vishal Gondal, Chairman and CEO, Indiagames.com. This young founder of the company has received funding from Infinity venture fund. Th e game derives inspiration from our very own Bollywood; while the fighting is on, the audio messages streamed would be in Hindi, including swearwords and phrases!

But developing a full-fledged portal in a regional language can present language-related difficulties. ``How do we devise a search engine that will effectively search other international sites and link to other global search engines as well?'' queries a Computer Society of India (CSI) member. ``Although private companies are developing their own software and solutions for the language portals, we need a body like the National Informatics Centre which creates the Government sites and so on, to really pus h Indian language use,'' feels Bhavin Kadakia, a CSI committee member.

There are other problems such as non-availability of standards, non-uniformity in keyboards and lack of exposure to computers, as well as resistance among targeted users. Development of computer software in Indian languages will greatly contribute to the cause of increased Internet usage. ``We need an accounting software in an Indian language, for instance,'' says a CSI member.

The National Association of Software and Services Companies (NASSCOM), has apparently even mooted the idea of offering domain names using Indian language scripts. And without Indian language use, very little of the newer technologies -- such as wireless application protocol (WAP) -- the latest technology for Internet connectivity through mobile devices -- can be of use in India.

``In India, it will work only where there are English-speaking users,'' says K.V. Seshasayee, Group Vice-President, Telecom, Hinduja Group. The Hinduja group is mobile licensee for the Gujarat circle. Until a service like WAP is available in Indian scrip ts, it is not going to take off in a big way, he says.