Monday, December 24, 2001		Article

Pune firm develops software in Indian regional languages
Frederick Noronha

IN A COUNTRY of a hundred million, where only a tiny segment of the population speaks English, what relevance does computing have to the common man? For many years now, a small firm from the central Indian city of Pune is keen to ensure that the non-English computer user is not left out in the cold.

Called ‘Mithi’— or Mithi Software Technologies Private Limited — this small firm has been consistently churning out interesting Indian-language software solutions for some time now.

"Mithi is a small firm with some 25 to 26 persons working in it. Thirteen to 14 are developers. The rest are administrative and marketing persons," says Mithi’s Ashish Kotamkar, who goes on to explain that the firm doesn’t believe in tagging designations to its staff.

By now, Mithi has made a name for itself by working for more than eight years in developing local language solutions. "Our focus has always been on local language technology. We felt this was a big opportunity, which nobody was taking seriously. Lots of persons were creating fonts, which is an easy job," he says.

Ashish points out that the more difficult task is "understanding technology," how each solution behaves with different OS (operating systems), and performs with different applications. "Not many people are giving that a thought," he says.

Today, Mithi’s work allows an Indian computer user to send e-mail in a dozen different languages, print Indian language documents, develop Indian language software and Web sites and even create hypertext content in ‘desi’ languages for educational and information CDs.

"We do have solutions in Punjabi (Gurmukhi) as well. In fact we are in talks with some media companies for providing them a content aggregation and management solution based on our multilingual content creation software (IndiaPage) and multilingual e-mail client (Mailjol Unplugged)," the firm executive says.

Years ago, Mithi collaborated with C-DAC for developing a "totally indigenous and customised" application. Their jointly worked-on solution was known as Leap or iLeap and was widely appreciated among non-English computer users in India who were eagerly waiting for an affordable and easy solution to their many needs.

"This is different from just being a font which rides on an English-based application," he says. "We did the designing and the development of the software. We used C-DAC’s spell-checker and fonts. Mithi and C-DAC have a joint copyright on the product," he says.

This product, developed in 1993-94, was called Leap. It came in two versions — Leap Office for the office environment, and iLeap for individual users. While the former costs Rs 12,500 for the end-user, the individual version costs Rs 1,500-2,000 for the user. Under special deals with ISPs (Internet Service Providers), users have got it at even more affordable rates.

"We always put in a lot of emphasis on encoding and standards. All our products and solutions are based on universal solutions like ISCII and Unicode. We also have striven to make our software as user-friendly as possible so as to ensure acceptability and adoptibility," Ashish Kotamkar says. "People had apprehensions. ‘How can you use Indian language software?’ ‘How would you be able to type?’ To sort out this, we offered on-screen keyboards, and a phonetic way of typing (that made the inputting of Indian-language texts a simple affair)," he says. Today iLeap has a user base of 4,00,000 to 4,50,000.

Currently, the focus is on using the Internet as a medium. "We are moving onwards. We have a completely customised e-mail application called Mailjol Unplugged. This allows sending and receiving e-mail in 11 Indian languages and English. You can use the English keyboard to write messages in Indian languages.

Prior to this, Mithi had developed Mailjol.com — a free Indian language Web-based e-mail system. "Currently, we have 1,50,000 registered users in some 120 countries. These are basically persons of Indian origin. Some 30 per cent of our users are NRIs (non-resident Indians)," Kotamkar adds with a tinge of satisfaction.

Earlier, many had skepticism whether NRIs would need such Indian-language solutions. Why bother when they could use widely-available English mailing solutions? "But when persons migrate out of the country, one of the first things they do for relatives back home is set up a computer, and try to get some way of communicating with them in their mother tongue, as our experience shows," explains Ashish Kotamkar.

The idea with Mailjol.com — the free Website — was to prove a concept.

"It was never meant to be a revenue model. We just wanted to showcase our technology, and get it validated," says Kotamkar. It has since more than done that, with the excellent response it has earned. In much of India, speedy connectivity to the Internet is still a problem.

This means that staying logged on to the Net for long hours to type and read e-mail can be a problem. "Even 30- 40 km outside Pune (where our firm is based), connectivity is not in good shape. People do not stay online for longer times," he says.

To work their way around this problem, Mithi has launched an off-line e-mail client, called Mailjol Unplugged. This multi-lingual desktop email software allows you to send and receive e-mail in 11 Indian languages. Plus English.

In some rural areas, Mithi’s work is already getting used to its optimum. In Bagalkot, a sugar-factory near the Maharashtra-Karnataka border in South-western India has planned some 17-18 kiosks around the factory. Farmers will be able to get information—on seeds, prices and consultancy -- by using touch-screen devices. All this in their regional languages.

Mithi also plans to work on small, grassroots application in open source. In the long run, this group is considering to port its applications to Linux. Unlike other many other export-oriented software firms, the firm proudly says, "our focus is the Indian market as of now". It is also working closely with other innovative projects like Tarahaat.com and Gyandoot, meant to take computing to the grassroots.