“With 5% of the population conversing in English, regional language tool kits become essential to expand the reach of computers,” Mr Maran said. So far, only three Indian language tools have been made available free of cost. The government plans to introduce tools in the remaining nine languages by December 2007.

The software tools prepared by C-DAC (Centre for Development of Advanced Computing) include transliteration tools, multifont keyboard engines, a spell checker and a bilingual dictionary. The free circulation of the software tools is meant to speed up the process of development in the areas of natural language processing, cross lingual information, language dictionaries and speech technologies.

Besides the fourteen C-DAC centres in the country and the ministry, the tools can also be downloaded from the Internet. Mr Maran also said that technologies in the area of artificial intelligence, such as speech to text and text to speech, need to be developed.

“As the first step to achieve this there were already five mission projects in place for developing server-based machine translation facilities for translating English into an Indian language,” the minister said.