An email ID in your own mother tongue? That day may not be far

Rishma Kapurmoneycontrol.comSoon, you will be able to create an email ID in your own mother tongue.  In keeping with its goal of digitising India, the government has initiated talks with technology companies to make it possible for people to create e-mail IDs in regional languages, starting with Hindi. An ET report says that the government last month met up with representatives of Google, Microsoft and Rediff and asked them to enable users to sign up for email services in regional languages. The Modi-led government, in its two years, has introduced various programmes to bring the country under a broader digital net. One such programme -- Bharat Net -- seeks to link up India’s households, especially in rural areas, through broadband. This ties in with the government's ambitious Digital India programme. Bharat Net programme aims at building a high-speed network to connect 2.5 lakh gram panchayats across the country by next year. This is the country’s largest rural broadband connectivity project. The move, if it happens, wills revolutionalise the use of emails in rural and semi-rural areas where more people are becoming net-savvy. A study by the Internet & Mobile Association of India (IAMAI) shows that of the 306 million internet users in India, 219 million are in urban India and the rest 87 million are in rural India. The study reveals that the user base in rural India increased 93 percent from December 2014 to reach 87 million at the end of December 2015. It is this base of users that the likes of Google and Rediff will look to corner. A majority of email addresses are limited to characters from the English alphabet. These characters are encoded in ASCII or American Standard Code for Information Interchange. As the name implies, only English alphabet are permited. But international emails will use Unicode characters, which will allow for foreign language alphabet to be keyed in, too.While having an email ID in your own mother tongue is food for thought, entire mails written in either Hindi or Tamil have been common place. Google does have a cumbersome way of allowing you to type a mail in Hindi. It has an inbuilt input tool that enables 'transliteration' of words.  To have a personalised keyboard with alphabet from your mother tongue could well be the next big disruption.