Findings from a recent, JuxtConsult survey of Internet users in the country surprised many in the IT industry, even as 44 percent of the participants expressed a preference for Websites in Hindi, while 25 percent wanted to read Web content in other local Indian languages.

Indeed an eye-opener for those who thought the World Wide Web to be a bastion for supporters of the Queen's English strictly. However, for those who believe in the strength of India s huge local language speaking population - not so startling a discovery after all!

Yes, the Hindi IT market seems to have taken-off silently during the past couple of years. Not only Hindi, but also other Indian languages such as Tamil have begun to be noticed by IT bigwigs.

Not surprising, Google's chief executive, Eric Schmidt, remarked that India (and not China) will become the world's biggest Internet market in "about five or ten years from now," based on current trends. Schmidt went on to say that Hindi (and not Hispanic) might become one of the world's three Internet languages, along with English and Chinese.

Reportedly, Google has already launched a Hindi interface for its search engine, while Microsoft plans to come-up with a Hindi edition of MSN.com. These and other findings warrant a closer look home, to see the diffferent players and their contributions to this ever-expanding market.

Says Balendu Sharma Dadhich, managing editor, www.prabhasakshi.com, which attracts monthly hits in the range of eight million, "Things have started looking-up in the local language Internet arena, following the emergence of a neo-IT-literate, Hindi-speaking population in small cities and towns. Portals such as ours are mostly surfed by young people of the middle class, which is more equipped now than five/six years ago, to make use of the Internet revolution. With the increase in PC penetration, telecom infrastructure, broadband availability, and IT education in India, this Internet-aware section of the society is propelling the growth of Hindi portals and Websites."

Another popular Hindi portal, Webdunia.com, headed by Vinay Chhajlani of the Nai Duniya group, is financially backed by a few venture capitalists and the Times of India group. The portal has reportedly already broken-even, and has registered profits this year.

Both Webdunia and Prabhasakshi have been developed independently as Internet-based organizations, rather than just Web extensions of newspapers. Whereas portals including Jagran.com, Amarujala.com, Bhaskar.com, and Rajasthanpatrika.com are in the category of Web-based extensions of established media houses. The Hindi online versions of BBC, Voice of America, and China Radio also come under this category.

As regards the scope of Hindi portals, they are expanding beyond providing news and information, to offering verticals including email (epatra and mailjol); live cricket scores (prabhasakshi); matchmaking services (jeevansathi.com); content aggregation services (samachar.com); astrological information (prabhasakshi and webdunia); search services (raftaar.com); event-based services (www.loksabhachunav.com); etc. The blogosphere too is replete with Hindi blogs maintained by enthusiasts.

And what about content? Portals like Webdunia, Jagran, and Prabhasakshi are known to offer up-to-date, quality content, with some like Prabhasakshi featuring a coveted list of contributors, including the likes of Kuldeep Nayyar, Khushwant Singh, and Arun Nehru.

The news is wide-ranging, and covers politics, current affairs, cinema, religion, health, literature, travel, women's issues, children, youth, and so on. A la newspapers, Prabhasakshi even sports a daily cartoon section by renowned Hindi cartoonist, Kaak.

Here, it would be worth-the-while to mention that a Google search on the word "Hindi" throws-up over 6.1 crore results as against that on "Mandarin" which yields only 2.4 crore results by contrast.

So, is everything hunky-dory for Hindi on the Web? "Probably not," says an industry insider, who feels that most Hindi portals are still searching for sustainable business models, given that survival is difficult with little or no financial support. This is especially true for independent portals that do not have the commercial base of say an established newspaper.

Reportedly, promising portals such as Netjaal.com, Womeninfoline.com, Niharonline.com, and Literateworld.com have had to call quits, due to increasing financial pressure.

But, as experts would say, the macro picture does look good, with a definite market shift taking place in favor of Hindi portals. These are in fact generating more advertising revenues than ever before.

Says Dadhich, "It's all in the numbers in media and IT. Look at Hindi newspapers, they have surpassed English newspapers long ago, in terms of readership. Hindi television channels too have managed to leave their English counterparts far behind. There are similar examples in case of Hindi films and Hindi radio. The reason for success is the strength in numbers (population). Web is just another medium of information, and as such, can only benefit from the overall market trend. After all, a Microsoft or a Google does not invest in a market they are not very sure about."

All said and done, the question remains, given the host of technological limitations related to font, storage, sorting, and language presentation, will Hindi portals be able to live-up to the level of confidence demonstrated by Dadhich, Chhajlani, and company.

Argues Dadhich, "IT itself has been invented to take care of problems. Let the problems emerge; IT will always have the power and means to tackle them. Once Unicode becomes a universally-adopted data storage standard, such technical snags will become irrelevant. We are indeed on the fast track to reach there."

One cannot but help admire his enthusiasm...