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CGNet, a group of people working to promote community participation in Chhattisgarh, run a website in Hindi, which they hope to make an e-PanchayatGhar.
Just as the industrial revolution changed the face of society forever, so is the Information Revolution reshaping the manner everyday activities are undertaken. The penetration of computing and the Internet into semi-urban and rural parts of India, has suddenly opened the door for vast development opportunities.
For the first time, large amounts of data and information are available at extremely affordable costs, and mutual interaction is now much simpler and cheaper than ever before. With this wave of change sweeping over India, a number or communities have established niches on the Information super highway, and are working for development. One such community is CGNet. CGNet is a group of people who are working to promote community participation in the development of Chhattisgarh.
Scenario
Chhattisgarh: The state
The state of Chhattisgarh in Central India was formed when sixteen districts of the former Madhya Pradesh were given separate state status. Chhattisgarh has a population of 20.8 million, over one third of which is tribal. The spoken languages are mainly Hindi and Chhattisgarhi.
Chhattisgarh has always had a strong rural tradition, with only 20% of the population being in urban centers. There has been a traditional concept of a gram sabha, which is a forum for members of the community to discuss issues and voice concerns relating to the community. The gram sabha usually meets at a Panchayat Ghar, which is like a resource center for the entire community. CGNet is trying to develop the concept of an e-PanchayatGhar through their website. Spoken LanguagesThe Chhattisgarhi language, part of the East-Central group of Indo-Aryan languages, pre-dominates language in the region. The hill districts of the state serve as a home to the Gond peoples, who speak Dravidian languages such as Gondi. The official language of the state is Hindi. Any medium of communication must therefore be in Hindi or Chhattisgarhi in order to be most effective. Also, the target audience of CGNet is the rural segment, and therefore the language becomes all the more important since the majority of eductaion in the rural sector is in Hindi. The literacy rate in Chhattisgarh is about 65%, with the literate population distributed as shown below:
 Despite the fact that the rural literacy rate is about 61% as opposed to 81% in the urban centers, the above graph shows that most of Chhattisgarh’s literate population lives in rural areas, where the medium of education is usually Hindi. This distribution also shows that any community program must be aimed first at the literate rural population and taken on from there. CGNet’s approach is particularly effective in this regard.
CGNet Website
In order to provide a forum for discussion of issues pertaining to Chhattisgarh, CGNet hosts a website featuring content related to a number of topics.
CGNet’s website (http://www.cgnet.in) is completely in Hindi and uses the Unicode standard. The site is hosted by One World South Asia, an organization which provides support to e-communities, by giving them web space and website management training.
The content of the site comes directly from the community, in the form of articles, written by the members of CGNet. The site is divided into a number of sections each covering one area of concern such as forestry, agriculture, minerals etc. Each section is run by a different subgroup of people who manage content for that particular topic. The goal is to provide the maximum number of people with the information concerning them, as well as a forum to discuss the issues that they feel are important to the community.
The participants on CGNet are located all over India, and some are even abroad. The common factor is a concern for Chhattisgarh and a drive to do something concrete. Since the lingua franca of the state is Hindi, the content of the site is almost totally in Hindi.
Too many different formats
The contributions that are received by CGNet are in many different fonts and formats. Prior to Indic computing and the Unicode standard becoming popular, it would have been a very difficult task to host all of this on the Web. However, with Indic language computing, and Unicode becoming a de facto standard, it is now possible to have Indian language content available over the Internet.
In order to make the content view-able to the maximum number of people over the current infrastructure, the contributions from members are converted to the common Unicode standard using the Indic computing tools, such as Microsoft Office 2003 etc. They also use other Indic supporting tools such as TBIL fonts converter, and the Hindi IME available for download at BhashaIndia.
However, this is still quite a challenge, since the number of different fonts and formats for Indian languages in computing is quite large. Certain fonts are still not directly convertible to Unicode. However, with the support from forums such as BhashaIndia, this problem is definitely finding a solution.
Connectivity and Infrastructure
Chhattisgarh, being a predominantly rural and largely tribal state, the connectivity and speed of the Internet is still not as good as in other parts of India. This means that the content hosted on CGNet needs to be in such a format that can be viewed even at lower speeds without too much time for downloads like fonts and plug-ins. Also, the majority of people access CGNet from internet parlors, which run older versions of Windows, such as Windows 98 or Windows NT, which may not have Indic support in built. Thus the format of the content needs to be such that even older operating systems can view it.
Solution Overview
Organization: CGNet
Profile: CGNet is a group working for community participation in development in the central Indian tribal state of Chhattisgarh
Scenario: CGNet required a medium for information exchange between the members of the community, which would be economically feasible. Since conventional media proved to be economically unfeasible for this purpose, they are now using the Internet as the medium of communication through their community website at http://www.cgnet.in
Microsoft Technologies Used
- Microsoft Office 2003 for content editing and management
- Microsoft WEFT (Web Embedded Fonts Tool) to embed the fonts on the page, in order to make it visible without a font download.
- Windows XP Professional
Solution
Use of the Internet Since conventional media is usually economically unsuited for use as a tool of community information exchange, CGNet decided to use the Internet as a medium for communication. The CGNet website, hosted by One World South Asia, is one of the first ever community sites in Hindi. It provides a cheap and freely accessible method of sharing information among the members of the community. CGNet hopes to develop the website as an e-PanchayatGhar, where members of the community can discuss community issues, voice their concerns and plan for the development of the community as a whole. The content and discussions on CGNet are classified under a number of sections such as Agriculture, Forestry, Minerals, Education etc. Each of these sections is semi-independently managed. The site also has a number of links to Hindi language media such as newspapers etc. The goal of the site is to provide a medium of information exchange to the common people. However, connectivity and Internet penetration is yet to reach its full potential in the state. The majority of community members access the Internet from Internet parlors. Use of Indic computing
With Indic language computing, it is now possible to work in Hindi on Windows XP. A number of CGNet members are now using Microsoft Office 2003’s Indic support to create the articles for CGNet. With other tools being created that support Indic computing such as the Hindi IME available from BhashaIndia, and the TBIL fonts converter, the conversion of those articles not in Unicode to the Unicode standard, is also much easier. Also, the wide range of formatting and editing tools available with MS Office are a great help in content production and management.
Embedded fonts
Connectivity and download speeds are limited in the state. Therefore in order to avoid the necessity to download and install fonts in order to view web pages in Hindi, CGNet uses embedded fonts on its website. Initially, without embedded fonts, the content was visible only on machines running Windows 2000 or above. However, it was brought to the notice of the developers that the majority of the target audience would be accessing the site from Internet parlors running older versions of Windows, which may not have Indic support in built. Embedded fonts proved to be the simplest solution to this problem.
CGNet uses the WEFT (Web Embedding Fonts Tool) application from Microsoft to embed the fonts onto the pages, in order to enable viewing on the machines without Hindi fonts installed. WEFT embeds the fonts in the form of .EOT (Embedded OpenType) files. These files are kept on the server with the pages.
Thus any Unicode enabled machine can be used to view the content on CGNet without explicitly downloading a font. This also works for most systems running older versions of Windows like Windows 98 and Windows NT. However, work is still being done in order to make the site more universally visible.
Converting between fonts
With Indian language computing still gaining widespread acceptance, there are a number of fonts and formats available for Indian Language computing. However, access to content online is not possible with most of these fonts and formats, and even in the cases where it is possible, it involves a tedious procedure of downloading the fonts and installing them before they can be viewed. In a scenario where a majority of users is accessing the content from an Internet parlor and paying by the hour, it is not feasible to expect the user to download a font each time. Thus the CGNet site follows the Unicode standard, which is a cross platform compatible standard for text manipulation in languages other than English.
The incoming contributions are all converted to the Unicode standard, using the font conversion tools which support Indic computing, such as the TBIL fonts converter, which is available for download at BhashaIndia.
This ensures uniformity and visibility over any Unicode supporting system. The font used for this is the Mangal font, which is used by Microsoft Office. After conversion to Mangal, the article may then be edited directly using Microsoft Word. This makes the creation and maintenance of web content much simpler.
The majority of fonts can be converted using available tools, but since the diversity and number of Hindi fonts is quite high, more efforts still need to be made to provide a universal converter.
Future plans
With the website in place, CGNet now plans to use it as a base for newsgathering of an alternate nature, wherein members of the community will do the collection and compilation of news related to the community in the role of Rural Communicators. These Rural Communicators will collect the news items, either in the form of text or audio and they will be posted on the CGNet website for the viewing of the community. This will require a standardized work environment where editing of text can be done in Hindi.
CGNet also plans to work with Internet parlor operators to promote use of Indian language computing on their systems, in order to allow users to interact with each other, by way of the web site, in Hindi. This could take the form of promoting the use of newer versions of operating systems, or enabling support to input in Indic languages on systems that are already Unicode enabled. They are also trying to enable support for as much audio content as possible, since Chhattisgarh has a strong oral tradition.
In addition to this, CGNet is also trying to find ways to make the content more universally visible. This includes support for older operating systems such as Windows 98 and Windows NT. Finally, CGNet also hopes to start Internet Clubs at the primary school level, to promote information sharing and familiarity with the Internet.
Benefits
CGNet has been extremely successful in its efforts at promoting discussion within the community. In the short span of a year, they have increased in number to more than 400 people. The members have divided the responsibility of running the different sections on the site. It has been extremely well received by the community. Some of the areas where CGNet has made an impact:
Dissemination on information
The CGNet website has fast become a forum for communication within the community. Since the content is in Hindi, people are able to relate to it better than a site in English. The website is now becoming a focal point for anyone looking for information about Chhattisgarh. A lot of positive feedback has been received about ease of use due to the language being one spoken by the majority of users.
Community participation
The CGNet website has also found great success in encouraging community participation in development. Some of the issues that have been raised on the CGNet website and forum have been taken up by the authorities concerned and action is underway. Members’ contributions are ever on the increase and the issues and concerns under consideration are perpetually increasing in number and scope. CGNet hopes to continue diversifying and expanding the issues it addresses.
Summation
While the advent of standards such as Indic and Unicode have definitely made the task of managing web content in Hindi easier, there is still a lot of work that needs to be done in the field of Indian Language computing. CGNet is one of the first ever efforts in the field of community participation in development through the use of the Internet as a medium. Their website is one of the first community website in Hindi. Such efforts are all the more commendable since they take the Information Revolution out of the cities, where it is reaching saturation and into the interiors of the country, where it can aid in development of the nation as a whole.
References and links that may be of further interest
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