State IT minister Mr Debesh Das said the group consisted of at least seven experts both from the field of IT and Bengali language studies. The group will conduct research to boost the use of Bengali in computers. The state government has plans to set up a research academy in this connection and a fund will also be allotted for this project in the budget.
The Union government has already increased the allocation for e-governance from Rs 300 crore to Rs 500 crore. But without the use of Bengali language in computers, e-governance is very hard to implement in West Bengal as only five per cent of the population in rural West Bengal is well-versed in English. Research needs to be carried out for development of a software which will be able to support Bengali language in computers.
Prof. BB Choudhury of Indian Statistical Institute, one of the experts in the group, said most of the computer software and the computer peripherals are produced keeping in mind the needs of English-speaking users.
The studies carried out by the ISI have shown that the most frequently used words in Bengali literature are Na, Kore and Ei. The alphabets which are most frequently used in Bengali are Naw and Kaw.
In most of the keyboards, these letters are not supported by single keys. One has to press at least two keys for a single alphabet to appear on the screen. This apart, keyboards are designed to give the user easy access to the most-used alphabets of English.
He said a proper code had to be developed which would support the use of Bengali in computers. At present, either the Indian Standard Code for Information Interchange (IISCII) or the UNICODE is used for typing Indian languages. A platform or an operating system like WINDOWS, LINUX and UNIX has to be developed which will support the language and the commands given in it.
The other facilities like spelling check and dictionary also have to be developed to facilitate typing in Bengali. Prof. Choudhury said an Optical Character Recognition had to be prepared which would be able to scan the alphabets of Bengali.
He said: “The group of experts will conduct research and also look into many other aspects concerning the development of computers which support use of Bengali.”
Autor(en)/Author(s): Joydeep Thakur
Quelle/Source: The Statesman, 15.03.2007
