Telecommunication and IT Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad told the Lower House of the Indian Parliament on Monday that it would be important for the government to improve the quality of life in villages in order to ensure economic and social development. At the same time, the minister said that the government would require active co-operation from provincial governments in this regard to achieve the target.
According to Prasad, the government will utilise more than 1.34 lakh internet enabled centres, which have already been set up in rural areas, to promote information technology in rural areas. “Our government is committed to expand the information technology to every village in the country. Provincial governments have to be on-board in our initiative. Involvement of Provincial governments is very important. Both Central and Provincial governments have to work together,” the minister told the House during Question Hour.
Meanwhile, Prasad admitted that the government has failed to provide bandwidth to many areas in the country, saying that the Narendra Modi administration is trying hard to improve the situation. The minister further assured members of the Parliament that he would ask the IT officials to ensure the availability of broadband facility in priority areas, such as issuing caste certificate in village offices.
Explaining the problems faced by the government while implementing the plan, Prasad said that it would certainly be a difficult job because India is a multi-lingual country and regional language barriers would have hampered the e-governance initiatives especially in rural areas. According to him, India has 22 official languages and less than 10% of Indian nationals can read and write English. “There are various other issues regarding Indian languages, such as orthography (spelling issues), pronunciation, one script for many languages and many languages with one script etc,” stressed the minister.
According to Prasad, the government is concentrating primarily on challenges posed by regional languages. These are character encoding, bandwidth cost, presentation issues, device limitations, lack of standardisation, fonts, backward compatibility with legacy devices, rendering issues, lack of availability for all characters, issue of multiple scripts, standardisation of glyph support, syllable composition and logic dependency on implementation level of handset manufacturer.
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Autor(en)/Author(s): Koushik Das
Quelle/Source: InSerbia News, 22.07.2014
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