The product manager of Google India, Jagjit Chawla explained that the company is gearing up to benefit for the next big thing—the Indic Web.  He explains: “Only 7% of the Indian population knows English and only 7% uses the Internet. There is very little content available in the local languages. The next wave of Internet users will be from Indic web.”

Microsoft has a number of products in the pipeline which can be localised and the company is also doing a lot of research on Indian language products. Project Bhasha, for instance, is a key milestone in Microsoft’s effort to stimulate local language computing and take IT to the masses, driven by the fact that 95% of Indians use their local language rather than English in their work and personal life.

It’s no surprise that software giant Microsoft saw an opportunity in the Indian language market even a decade back and started off with localisation of Windows 2000 and two Indian languages—Hindi and Tamil. Today, Microsoft supports 12 Indian languages. Assamese, Bengali, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Konkani, Malayalam, Marathi, Oriya, Punjabi, Tamil and Telugu.

Today, the web is not relevant to a majority of users in India as there is lack of regional content. In the billions of pages on the net, there are only 40 million Indian language pages. You can now type in English and get Indic text. This was a local need inspired software. It started with Hindi and the R&D for this happened in Bangalore.

See: The Economic Times