India is already recognized as one of the IT powerhouses guiding the technology revolution in the world. In the outside world, the impression that our status as an IT superpower gives is that most of Indian youth possess IT knowledge and skills. Indian youth have undoubtedly played a pivotal role in our success in IT. However, we can’t deny the fact that it is only a tiny percentage of Indian youth that is contributing to the country’s success in this sector. A many times larger percentage of youth is still untouched by the IT phenomenon and has no active role to play in the growth of our IT industry.

They are youth from small towns, cities and villages, whose primary language of education and conversation is not English. They may be intelligent and creative and have an analytical and logical bend of mind, but are not very comfortable with the Queen’s English. Non-English speakers form more than 95% part of India’s population. A group of people of an unthinkable size, that doesn’t feel English to be a necessity. A group that may be larger than populations of the US, Russia and a few European countries put together. Have you ever wondered what would happen if educated youths from this large population group are empowered to participate in the IT revolution; not only as a user but also as a contributor and a developer?

This could indeed be possible if development of ‘programming languages in Hindi and other Indian languages’ takes place. ‘An impractical imagination’, did you say? May be not, as there are programming languages available in the world which are not based on English keywords. Some of them use keywords from vernacular languages, while others don’t follow the natural language compatibility structure adopted by most modern programming languages.

We are seeing a trend of software companies offering software packages with Indian language interfaces. After a while, even software development solutions may adorn menu systems in Indian languages. A Hindi/Indian language based programming language, however, could be much more useful in bringing the IT development revolution to the locals, and could prove to be the true localization of software development process itself.

To understand the concept better, let’s talk about the C or C++ programming languages. A programmer writing code in these languages, uses the keywords ‘PRINTF’ or ‘COUT’ commands to display data on the computer monitor. These languages (and most of the other modern programming languages) use English language words to develop software programs or as commands. A Hindi based computer programming language could replace them with Hindi words such as ‘प्रदर्शन’ and मुद्रण.

There are many such non-English based programming languages available worldwide such as Lexico (Spanish based), Aheui (Korean), Sako (Polish), Rapira (Russian), Arlogo (Arabic) etc. Such languages not only make available an alternative platform for use by non-English development community, but also help immensely in popularizing software development among students. Logo and Basic have been converted in many non-English languages.

In India, where open source computing is not as popular as overseas, very few efforts of this kind have taken place. A couple of programmers have developed local language versions of Logo (a programming language for children).

However, a Kolkata based developer Abhishek Chowdhary has achieved remarkable success by developing a Hindi software development platform named ‘Hindawi’. Hindawi is a suite of FREE open source programming languages for vernaculars (Hindi version released, Bangla version ready). It can be used to teach children programming in their mother tounge, and can also be used for serious programming tasks, including systems programming in equivalents of C, C++, lex, yacc, Java(TM) and assembly.

Similarly, Mr. UB Pavanja has developed a Kannada version of Logo. However, other than Hindawi, no significant effort has been made to develop a full fledged programming platform in Hindi and other languages that can be used to write modern day computer programs using code that has no English words. Will some IT biggie come forward to utilize this great business opportunity and to help take IT software development revolution to our smaller cities?