Content & Applications in Marathi empowers Internet Population of Maharashtra: Ajay Data

FICCI- ILIA Marathi Conclave: Experts stressed on breaking linguistic barriers on Internet

Mumbai, May 6, 2019: Innovations and universal efforts have prompted the development of content and applications in regional or local languages such as Marathi and this transformation empowers majority of non-English internet population of Maharashtra, according to Ajay Data. Speaking at Marathi Conclave organized by FICCI-Indian Language Internet Alliance here today Dr. Ajay Data, Co – Chair ICT and Digital Economy Committee, FICCI, Chairman of The Universal Acceptance Steering Group (UASG) ICANN, Founder & CEO, DataXgen Technologies Pvt. Ltd. said, “There was a need to push internet content with Indian languages. Now we have taken a leap forward with the internet 4.0 which breaks the language barrier for both content and access.  With Universal Acceptance-ready systems, content and applications in Marathi would empower majority of people in Maharashtra.”

Chairing a Session on “Issues and challenges by content publishers in adopting and generating content on the web,” he said, “India has more than 50% of the 900+ TV channels that broadcast in regional languages. When someone speaks in English, it goes into mind but if someone speaks and writes in his/her own language it goes directly into heart. There are more than 1.6 billion websites in the world and around 85 million populations which speak Marathi. You can probably count websites which has Marathi Domain Name with Marathi content.  This is a barrier Marathi community needs to resolve.”

Citing example Marathi language, he said, “Marathi newspapers have deep penetration in terms of readership. There was a need to push internet content with local languages. Efforts made by  the multi-stakeholder community model of internet governance under the aegis of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) have yield positive results.” Experts at the Conclave stressed on breaking barriers on internet and its wide impact. Software and application developers, network engineers, and domain name registrars had to re-engineer their existing programmes to make it “Universal Acceptance (UA)” principle which enables all systems to function within all applications regardless of script, number of characters, or how new it is.

Ajay Data mentioned that variations of .Bharat TLD is now available in 15 scripts including Marathi, Bengali, Tamil, Telugu, Gujarati, Urdu and Gurmukhi.

To make Indian language specific Top Level Domains (TLDs) possible, a Neo-Brahmi Script Generation Panel (NBGP) was formed under ICANN  in 2015.  The NBGP started working on to develop Root Zone LGR for Marathi, Bengali, Devanagari, Gujarati, Gurmukhi, Kannada, Malayalam, Oriya, Tamil and Telugu scripts. Once implemented, domain names in the above Indian languages can be registered to address the non-English internet users in India.

Apart from accessing web content, domain names are also used for email addresses and a host of other Internet applications. Therefore, Universal Acceptance needs those software applications which are updated to accept the new generic TLDs and International Domain Names (IDNs). Once implemented in full, end users can use applications with the new domain names without compromising on functionality and performance.

About Data XGen Technologies Pvt Ltd

Founded in 2010, Data Xgen technologies Pvt Ltd. is a group company of Data Infosys Ltd.  It is one of the largest Enterprise Email Management Solution Provider worldwide. It offers XgenPlus, an enterprise email server, which provides secure unified communications, such as email, transactional emails, push mail, group emails, chat, SMS, e-marketing, and faxing at one place. Data XGen Technologies continues to innovate and aims be a global leader in the email market-place by being a premium next-generation email platform and to serve the entire spectrum of organizations – from small businesses to the enterprise a secure and affordable platform