In a country having a pre-dominantly Hindi-speaking populace, it spells good news that Reliance Infocomm (RIL) has launched Reliance World in the "rashtra bhasha," thus enabling hundreds of millions of citizens to access popular mobile services via Hindi-based applications.

RIL says that this is the first time in the world, that mobile data offerings are being provided in more than one language on the same handset.

R World will now offer its entire click-and-browse experience in Hindi, and the Hindi option will not carry an additional charge - or require a handset change - or upgrades - or a visit to WebWorld / WebWorld Express.

R World in Hindi will be able to be used by customers on old handsets as well as new ones, and R World's posse of services will be re-worked so as to facilitate this. Estimatedly - over 7 million Reliance subscribers will be able to immediately avail of the new service.

In order to change the settings to R World in Hindi, customers will need to enter R World and then select "RWorldHindi" under the "Hot N New" section. Similarly to change back to R World in English, customers will need to simply click on "Set English" in the "Hot N New" section.

Mahesh Prasad, president - application solution group, Reliance Infocomm, said, "This is another giant step that we have taken towards connecting with the real India. The first was when we announced our mega rural expansion plan in January. R World is very popular among our customers with the English user interface itself. However, with this new initiative we will be able to address the need for mobile content, and the entire user experience in regional languages which we are trying to quickly fill."

RIL says that R World's software base is now geared to handle all major Indian languages, beginning with Hindi. As an initial step Reliance is offering text-based news in eight regional languages, plus some mobile games in Hindi, Marathi and Gujarati.