For all the euphoria over our tech-savvy young brigades, India lacks far behind in Internet usage (refer my post, 747 million people use Internet), but more alarmingly, India just doesn’t have enough content-rich sites. There are English language blogs like this one or other few content sites in English (mainly newspapers and portals), but coming to local language sites, India’s record is abysmal.
Leaving aside newspaper sites and suchlike, there are hardly any Indian vernacular sites that promptly come to mind. Whatever few are there, they lack good readable contents.
Compare this with tens of thousands sites in Chinese Mandarin, Japanese, Korean among Asian languages, and of course those in French, German, Spanish, Italian, and so on. No wonder, Internet penetration is significantly more in those countries.
The irony is many of us, the informed Indians, use the Internet for sundry reasons except for contents. What it is we do there? A newspaper article I read sometime back (can’t recall the source) informed that a vast majority uses Internet to book railway and air tickets. Following them are those who only send and receive emails.
Surprisingly (or does it surprise!!), the Indian net-savvy young urban populace use Internet mostly to chat. Which is why Orkut is so popular among them. They love wearing Orkut – rather ‘doing Orkut’ – on the sleeves. Stretch your ears, don’t you hear ‘do you Orkut?’ the most!
Elsewhere, the onus is heavily on contents. Search engines are known to place premium on quality contents and interlinking among them. In many countries, schools and higher institutes have compulsory fieldworks in curriculums, and for all students it’s mandatory to post their works on the Internet. True that is not possible in India because many students and even schools do not have computers.
But even where the schools and students do have computers, there is no emphasis on fieldwork. What instead happens is the students are asked to do ‘research’ on a given topic on Internet, and submit them in print form to the teachers. This ensues a test of skill among the ‘Internet-knowing’ parents of the students.
Words, figures and images are copied from sites like Wikipedia and National Geographic, assimilated, and printed (preferably in laser printers) for submission to school. These pass as project works by students. Sometimes they’re done so cutely that the school authorities keep them for future use and refuse to return.
The setup is perfect for young learners not to try writing much beyond what they pour out in exams. In my opinion, lack of stress on writing and inability to understand its necessity right from grassroots level are among the main reasons why there are not many local language sites in India. Bengali, for example, is one of the top 5 popular languages in the world, yet we don’t have content sites in the language except for newspaper sites.
Pity we need giants like Yahoo! to launch vernacular portals in order to create awareness and popularize the need of web contents in Indian languages.
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