Meet Mr. Shubhranshu Choudhary

Founder Member, CGNet, a community portal for the Chhattisgarh

With Indian language computing becoming simpler and the Internet gaining popularity throughout the country, groups dedicated to community participation in the development process are emerging. One such group is CGNet, working in Central Indian tribal dominated state of Chhattisgarh Shubhranshu Choudhary, a journalist, is one of the founder members of CGNet. He spoke to us about his experiences at using Hindi on their people’s website. Mr. Choudhary has worked extensively in print and television media, including the Guardian, London and the BBC. What kind of work is CGNet planning to do in Chhattisgarh, and how do you plan to implement this? SC: CGNet (http://www.cgnet.in) is intended to be a people’s website for the state of Chhattisgarh. Chhattisgarh, like most of India has traditionally followed the concept of a gram sabha. The entire rural community meets and discusses issues relating to the running of different services and management of available resources. Our aim is to bring back the participation of the community in the democratic process through effective communication The major languages spoken are Chhattisgarhi and Hindi, so the medium of communication should be in one of these two languages. Both these languages use the Devanagari script. Conventional media today, i.e. print and television, are not economically viable for use by small communities. We need more participation from people in policy matters.

Technology has given us an opportunity to recreate the community infrastructure. We started by running an e discussion group and we now have over 400 members in one year. We talk about issues related to the development of Chhattisgarh (http://www.36garh.notlong.com).

We want to develop CGNet website as a modern e-Panchayat Ghar, where any Chhattisgarhia, living in any part of the world can visit from time to time, discuss, debate and act when they agree on anything. The different sub groups focus on different aspects of development, e.g. industry, forestry, education, tribal welfare etc. To encourage more and more community participation over time, we are trying to keep as much of the content as possible in Hindi or Chhattisgarhi, with a view to include the tribal dialects as well over time.

Could you give us a brief overview of Hindi computing usage at CGNet, in terms of content types and volume of data?

SC: We would like to keep as much content in Hindi as possible. We have been quite successful in the fulfillment of this aim. But in some districts of Chhattisgarh literacy rate for women is still 20%. Since the state of Chhattisgarh has traditionally had a strong oral culture, we are aiming at ultimately providing most of the content in audio format. We would like this website to be linked with Community Radio stations all over the state. But the government policy on radio limits us. So we rely on text and audio on the website as our primary medium. We host content contributed by members living in Chhattisgarh or outside. Most of it is in Hindi. To maximize access, we are using Microsoft’s Indic computing as a standard. The advent of UTF and the Mangal font, along with the tools that support content creation and management on this platform have proved to be very helpful. Contributions are in different fonts and formats. We convert it to the UTF standard, and upload to the website as web pages. Contributions in those few fonts which we have not been able to convert so far are hosted as PDF files, which are available for download from our site. But this is tedious for the user- takes long on a slow connection, and we would like it all to be available in Mangal font if others could use it easily at their end.

What is the target audience you are aiming for in terms of education and level of computer expertise?

SC: We intend CGNet to have content which is relevant to all of Chhattisgarh, so that people from various backgrounds can meet at a common platform. We hope to make communication possible between people from all streams and walks of life. The ultimate aim is to promote talking. Amartya Sen has described Indians as being fundamentally argumentative people. We wish to bring back that spirit of debate and discussion. The effectiveness of this method depends greatly on the availability of the medium in a language common to all participants. It would be very simple to do it in English, but then the reach would be limited. So despite its being more complex to use Hindi we would still prefer to pursue this trend. With more and more development in the software segment for Indian languages, this is becoming less complex and more accessible.

What are the major challenges you face in using Hindi computing and how did you counter them?

SC: In terms of community participation the major challenge is to train people to use the available Hindi computing framework. At the implementation level the problems start at a very basic level. Users of some older systems like Windows 95 and 98, sometimes the page does not view as expected. The visibility of fonts on different browsers and OS versions is the challenge. Since multilingual support is not the default on a number of systems, special effort is required to read content in Hindi, and even more effort is required to write. We worked around the problem of viewing the content by embedding the fonts into the page using Microsoft’s WEFT package. Another major hurdle is the fact that the majority of users will be accessing the content from internet parlors, which primarily use Windows 98 and NT, which are not as equipped to support Hindi computing as Windows XP. We are still trying to find an efficient way to work around this and would welcome any suggestions. Also the number of Hindi fonts in use around the country is quite diverse and a common standard which can be used by everyone has only recently been available in the form of Indic.

How do you handle content management i.e. how do the articles come in and what kind of processing do you as a moderator need to do on them?

SC: We invite content from our contributors in electronic format, in any of the fonts that can be converted to Mangal using a font converter package like TBIL. This is to ensure that the content can be hosted in an accessible manner on the website.

What kind of further support would you like from the developer community for Hindi computing?

SC: Hindi computing still needs lots of development. Formatting of text is erratic at times, which requires more attention to be paid as compared to editing text in English. Some sort of solution for internet parlor usage, where people can access the content directly, with minimal effort in terms of installation, would be very helpful. Sometimes, when people find the typing in Hindi script difficult, we get content in Hindi or Chhattisgarhi, but typed in English script. The Hindi IME available for download from BhashaIndia, which we saw being used recently, appears to be a step in exactly the right direction, since phonetic keyboards are much easier to use than other types.

How different is hosting language content online from static content in print etc?

SC: With online content, more emphasis can be laid on localization, both geographical as well as in terms of people. Local content can be generated in a manner that is economically feasible. There is really no comparison because so far the commercial media i.e. print and television is driven by advertising and business and is therefore economically unfeasible for people with a small community and small budget. The internet provides a brilliant solution to the economics of spreading information. Also, it enables two way communications, which is more beneficial for community participation.

What tools do you use most often?

SC: We use a number of tools supported by the Indic framework. For example we use the TBIL font converter to convert between fonts. We have of late used WEFT (Web Embedding Fonts Tool) to embed the fonts that we have used into the page itself in EOT (Embedded Open Type) format to ensure that the end user does not have to download the font. As mentioned before, we have seen the Hindi IME available for download at BhashaIndia, which we hope to use extensively from now on.

While working with Hindi content, have you come across or developed any shortcuts or tricks to work more efficiently that you would like to share?

SC: While working with any new tool for languages, it is very important to keep an open mind. One example that comes to mind: Recently we were trying to convert the SV Surya font to Mangal, and direct conversion was not working. With hit and trial one of our members found that. It is possible to convert SV Surya to another font called Kruti Dev and then convert from that to Mangal. These things can only be found out through regular use. But it is very important to stay perseverant and to not give up. Experimentation is a must. These days there are many communities online, working for Indic Computing, which are proving to be very helpful

How could it be made more feasible for developers to work on Indic Computing?

SC: Many communities together could probably make the development of software feasible. It may be possible for many communities to combine and fund development on tools which could then be used by everyone. But this will require more participation from people in Indian language computing. We would like clones of CGNet to come up in other states and they can help each other. All the north Indian states including Maharashtra use the same Devanagari script.

How effective have you found the framework available for Indian Language computing so far?

SC: The majority of our content is running in Hindi. We had started with a token presence of the local languages in mind, and we are now demanding more and more Hindi content from our contributors. So now we can call CGNet a true Hindi/representative web site. It is one of the first Hindi websites for the state of Chhattisgarh; the state Govt. websites with support from NIC are still in English. So the current framework has definitely been extremely helpful and is becoming more so with time and as we discover more tools.

What kind of basic computing information do you think a person needs in order to run a dynamic content website in Hindi?

SC: With phonetic keyboards and language interfaces for operating systems becoming common, one would not require any more than very basic computing knowledge to do something like this.

How can Indic computing be made simpler for everyday use?

SC: What is needed to promote Indic Computing, is more clearly written tutorials, and increased support from developers and users for this sort of work. It would also be helpful to have more publicized sources of information pertaining to language computing.

Are there any references, online or otherwise which you would like to recommend for people planning language computing?

SC: We found the following resources quite useful: The BhashaIndia website is an excellent forum for discussions regarding language computing. They also have some great tools that make life much simpler for users. The Government of India’s recently released CD promoting Indian language computing was also very helpful.