NEW DELHI: India needs to ensure that all her officially recognised 22 languages can be adequately represented to make Web accessible in Indian languages a reality. In view of this, the role of India becomes prominent especially in the area of internationalisation, Minister of State for Communications and Information Technology Sachin Pilot said.
Speaking at a two-day Conference on World-Wide-Web: Technology, Standards and Internationalisation, which coincided with the opening of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) India Office, the Minister said this would go a long way in accelerating the growth of Web in Indian Languages. India is committed to the goal of ‘Internet for All’, and the Government in close co-operation with other stakeholders has taken several steps in this direction, the Minister added.
Emphasizing the need for taking the benefit of Information Communication Technology (ICT) to masses, the Ministers said that engagement with W3C in building all the required standards will facilitate information access on World Wide Web regardless of languages, location, ability, generation, age and income. Besides facilitating wider access of web by common men, it will also equip them to provide locally relevant content on the internet. Such initiative will play a great role in reducing poverty, improving health care, education, spreading good governance and addressing all local challenges in the global context.
Department of Information Technology Secretary R Chandrashekhar, Joint Secretary N Ravishankar, and Swaran Lata who is Country Manager W3C India Office and head of the TDIL programme were also present.
W3C India Office has been set up at DIT under the aegis of Human Centered Computing Division. The Division is implementing the programme ‘Technology Development for Indian Languages’ (TDIL). TDIL Programme is engaging itself actively since 2006 with all the stakeholders in the country to work towards internationalization of W3C Recommendations.
World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is an international Standards Body which develops Standards / Best Practices / recommendations to ensure seamless web access to all. The Vision of W3C is to achieve “Web for Everyone and Web on Everything.” W3C works in tandem with others standards making bodies such as UNICODE, IETF, ICANN and ISO at the international level. W3C has so far published about 183 standards for web technology and working in the future web standards. Recommendations evolved by W3C run across many technical domains.
