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With 137 million of the 150 million English-speaking people accessing the Web in India, it is time for the Internet to reach out to non-English languages.
Digital media and search engine firm Google has said the Web in English is unlikely to go beyond the 150-million mark in India.
Needs to speak ‘Indian’
“The next 300-400 million users coming online will have to be from Indic (Indian) languages. We need to address the challenges of fonts and local content to make it happen,” Rajan Anandan, Managing Director, Google India, said.
Talking to mediapersons here on Friday on the sidelines of the two-day Digital Summit 2012 being organised at the Indian School of Business (ISB), he said the types of services too need to be changed in order to attract the language users to the Internet.
“Innovation has to come from the grassroots to offer services in local languages to cater to specific needs,” he said.
The other major challenges Internet growth in the country faces are poor bandwidth, affordable devices and tablets. “We don’t have enough bandwidth when the 300-400 million more people come online,” he said.
On Google’s initiatives in reaching out to the Indic users, he said the latest Android (Google’s Operating System for mobile devices) platform allows speech-to-text commands. “People can tell what they want on the Internet and it will be answered,” he said.
Digital marketing
He said the size of digital marketing was Rs 1,500 crore. Though it is very small when compared to the overall advertising pie, it was expected to grow to Rs 2,500 crore this year.
> kurmanath.kanchi@thehindu.co.in
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