Local language fonts to be made mandatory for computers in India

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New Delhi, April 25: Read, write and work in Tamil, Telugu, Bengali, Gurmukhi, Hindi...on your computer. If the government has its way, all computers would need to come fully loaded with fonts of Indian languages. So a basic understanding of the English language will cease to be a prerequisite for the use of computers.

In an effort to take IT to the masses, the government today said it was planning to make it mandatory for original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) to load fonts of major Indian languages in computers to facilitate language computing.

“After we (government) complete the initiative to distribute fonts in Indian languages freely, we will make it mandatory for OEMs (IBM, HCL, etc) to load these fonts,” communications and IT minister Dayanidhi Maran told newspersons on the sidelies of ELITIX’ 2005 here.

“My ministry has launched a process of dedicating in phased manner the tools, products and resources for public use in Indian languages developed with government support and other independent initiatives. As a first step in this direction, various Tamil language fonts, e-mail client in Tamil, OCR, spell checker, dictionary (English-Engligh-Tamil) and (Tamil-Tamil-English), Tamil typing tutor, etc, were released in public domain for use by the masses on April 15, the Tamil New Years Day. All Indian languages are expected to be covered in the next one year,” Mr Maran said.

He said as less than 5% of the country’s population spoke English, it was necessary to have fonts of major Indian languages freely available in computers. “The ministry has taken it upon itself to distribute the fonts freely,” he said.