Creating documents in local languages with ease is now well established. Use of free software for this is still only rare in e-Governance . However, localisation in e-Governance requires much more than that. It requires fluency in use of local languages in mass usage . For this to happen, the localisation components will have to snugly fit into the government system, in particular into the currently used database and public interface systems. Here, localised free/opensource has tremendous advantage which has the necessary freedom to adapt without costing a bomb. The national asset of software talent is of little worth if it cannot or does not take on this challange.

Background: Over ripe
What has happened over the last few years was laying the ground for breaking the language barrier in the digital world. National and international state initiatives, voluntary movements, academic research, individual zeal and commercial interests have all propelled it.

Skew debate
Often debates were reduced to national pride versus multi-national conspiracy theories if not cacophony. The element of truth on both sides was getting clouded due to immaturity of technology. At this juncture the Free/GNU platform started making strides on software front in many ways but a little slowly on Indian languages. But this slowness was steadily towards universal standards and hence almost deliberate. GNU/Linux community then adopted unicode standard after a deep thought and could do so, easily.

The technological springboard
Over last few years, efforts like those of corporations (most notably IBM) have worked towards making many localisations technically and commercially feasible. These include establishing locale specifications i.e culturally specific invariants for a given language/nation/script, harping on unicode standard, supporting GNU/Linux vendors and supporting GNU/Linux as platform for many of its applications, ICU, ECLIPSE etc. For many young minds seeking career in software, ‘Linux’ started appearing as an alternative after all. Sun Microsystems (along with support from IBM again) towards OpenOffice.org made office users see an alternative. Similarly support by many other international corporations have made ‘Linux’ a respectable name in corporate and government parlance. This the undersigned sees as the springboard for a quantum jump.

As a passing observation, one is compelled to remind that in all this emphasis on ‘Linux’ and ‘Open Source’, one misses the ‘free’ (as in freedom) element of the GNU/Linux movement. But that remains the challenge for ethically inspired proponents of free software like the undersigned.

Free software in localisation
Localisation in general, and that in Indian language in particular, poses the issue of free software frontally. If the mass of Indian population has to access benefits of IT revolution, the proprietor tags and associated price tags will prove to be the insurmountable obstacles. Freedom will be necessary condition to reach out to people. The economic model that will make this viable and financial muscle, that government may provide would provide the sufficient condition. The government policy will play a major role in this.

Till recently, the undersigned was convening the localisation effort through a non-profit, un-organised group of trainee-volunteers called Indictrans team. What Indictrans team has done over the last one year is the emphasis on deploying the free software in e-Governance and to a slight extent in education and rural context. 

Principally our aim was to identify stumbling blocks in adoption of the free localised open source software in e-Governance. More importantly we looked at the difficulties in government-citizen interface. Team looked at the problems in adopting unicode standard in applications developed for government functioning and much more.

This may be seen in contrast to many others who started much earlier than us and have been doing the yeoman’s service to indic localisation. They are completing the important tasks of localising GUI’s like GNOME/KDE or some applications. See www.indlinux.org site for more details of language teams. While users who would want a complete GUI in local language are growing, they will significantly impact the use of software only after a few years. There are teams working on some even more ambitious projects like making machine translations from one Indian language to another etc. The machine translation, we expect will mature only after a few years, i.e. after massive corpa are analysed and lexicons built. These tasks require much greater resources, skills and much deeper commitment. Many enthusiasts have been working on these projects with frugal resources. Indictrans team always acknowledged that we stood on the shoulders of these teams.

Following is a brief description of two major tasks accomplished by Indictrans team in the area of localisation. First was standardisation i.e. conversion of live data and file-journey-management database from non-unicode to unicode standard. The second was Voterlist search engine for Chief Electoral Officer of Maharashtra.