Tuesday, March 8, 2011

Common Man and Indian IT There were several requesters in queue after me and all of the requests were rejected citing the same problem. With intent to help him, I thought of asking about the error message which he got when printing. I convinced him, that if he reads out the error message, I might be able to help him. Convinced by my confidence, he read out the error message.


I recently visited a public sector bank to get my passbook updated with the latest transactions. Upon my request, they informed me that the passbook printer was out of order and it would be fixed when the technician would come. There were several requesters in queue after me and all of the requests were rejected citing the same problem. With intent to help him, I thought of asking about the error message which he got when printing. I convinced him, that if he reads out the error message, I might be able to help him. Convinced by my confidence, he read out the error message. The error was a minor issue, which could have been resolved by applying common sense, but after understanding the error message. I was able to resolve the error from the counter within matter of couple of minutes and finally got my passbook printed.
The next day, I saw President Obama having a very successful Video conference with the Kanpura villagers, where the villagers explained how they used the IT to change their lives. Nevertheless, is that true for rest of the masses in India, I seriously doubt that!
Thus somewhere in the distant corner of my heart, a question keeps arising, is the IT industry in India doing enough and as a professional are we doing enough to get the common man onboard the IT journey. I always conclude with the same answer, no.
I know this discussion will always lead into a fundamental question, which is well stated by Subhash Bhatnagar of IIM-Ahmedabad, in his introduction to a book on rural IT in India. How can we justify the expense of IT in a rural India where so many basic needs are unmet and so many basic rights are violated? That said, I am sure, the Government is already working for the most cost-effective means of helping ordinary Indians, especially those in the weaker sectors of the society to meet their fundamental needs and achieve their basic rights and IT would be playing its role there.
In this export oriented structure of Indian IT industry, I am not sure how many of the IT companies are working to help people solve their day-to-day problems. However, I have decided to do my bit in this. This series of articles in times group portal will look into bringing awareness about common IT problems for common man. This series will try to provide information on how to make the usage of IT easier. I will take up questions on the portal and will try to provide answers to common problems. With such a good platform from Times group, I will try to make this series a good forum for common man.
As the first part of the series, I will provide multilingual typing capability that can be used in day-to-day activities on your PC.
Multilingual typing in your PC
Currently the most common way of typing in Indian languages is using the specific language keyboard and supporting software. For example, if I have to type something in Hindi, I need
• Hindi keyboard or a Hindi skin for English keyboard• Hindi Fonts• Unicode enabled Operating System (e.g. Windows XP)• An application supporting Hindi (e.g. Microsoft Word or Adobe PageMaker)• Hindi Typing knowledge - which is a difficult knowhow to have
However, what would you say if I provide information about a very easy and cost effective way to type in different Indian languages?
I am going to describe something called as Transliteration.

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