Project Darpan: Digitizing Indian local languages

Compared to the relatively slow adoption rate of the traditional PC, that of the mobile ballooned, rather quickly. India has about 9 million PC users and a whopping 500 million mobile users, which is still growing. The increase in the number of PC (with Internet) users will have a powerful impact on the Indian online market. Language barrier is among the various factors that play foul for PC penetration and consumption of digital data. Multilingual interfaces pertaining to local languages would ensure that the Internet isn’t limited to literate users only. Intel, along with its software partners have been working on an initiative to come up with a simple, easy to use and multilingual user interface, and this has given rise to Project Darpan. It is an initiative by Intel and its partners to increase this number to the potential 100 million households in India who can buy the PC.

Simple user interface

What is Project Darpan?

Project Darpan is a simple graphical user interface, allowing users not comfortable with the English language to choose from five local Indian languages and access digital data like News, Entertainment, Music, Comics in the language of their choice. The project is still in the beta stage and therefore there is a limit on the content available in languages other than English and obviously could be buggy as well. This is a step towards introducing digital content to masses by negating language barriers, if any. So, it may not necessarily please an Internet savvy user, but could be a great deal for those looking to access content online in other local languages.

Some key highlights:

• Darpan software provides the consumers with an easy to understand interface to key Internet applications.
• Darpan also has the key functionality to customize the language interface from a list of Indian languages.
• Darpan offers the freedom to change the color schemes and themes for the user.
• Darpan is automatically updated and the consumer can have access to newer content tabs periodically.

 
We spoke to Mr. Sachin Kelkar, Head, APAC software partner program, Intel, who has been handling the Project Darpan. This is what he said, “Project Darpan will help Indian users who are often scared to use computers due to lack of relevant  content and fear of English. Project Darpan will take away this fear by providing an easy access to Indian internet content in a simplified manner. Project Darpan will create an ecosystem of content providers and innovative software companies which will impact the consumption of internet content in a big way, thus by fuelling a local language content ecosystem spiral. This initiative will also explore robust business models for all the ecosystem players and will benefit the end consumer immensely.” 

Sachin Kelkar,Head, APAC software partner program, Intel

Roughly 18 months back, the Intel team began conceptualizing the initial stages of the project Darpan. The move began with understanding the challenges faced by common Indian users in accessing PCs, which has been found to be very critical in improving the PC desirability. Some more research and simple and localized comsumption of local Indian content could be lacking. “The factor of Indian local language usage as computing medium was analyzed and it gave the idea to explore software solutions which explore this concept of simplicity and ease of access,” he added.

News in local languages

He further tells us that the early version of Darpan was used as proof of concept by Intel internally to gather feedback from various stakeholders and customers. Based on the feedback and working with ecosystem partners, the current version was developed by M/s GoDB . The role of Intel is to provide support for  adoption of usage of Darpan by working with various Go To Market initiatives with its channel partners and OEMs. Through Project Darpan , Intel will be keen to evolve the content ecosystem in Indian languages.