I found this cartoon on the whiteboard in an library study room.

In a recent submit, the CEO of Rediff.com a popular Indian Internet portal said that Indian Internet users don’t want content in their native language. His supporting evidence is Rediff provides email services in 11 languages, but only 1% of users use the non-english version. Indians learn English before completing higher education, he added.

His comments are not surprising. But I don’t think Rediff users’ language preference can’t be extended to all Indian Internet users. I hardly write in Tamil (my mother tongue) and I have never used Rediff’s services in non English languages. But I don’t think Rediff provides the best user experience; their UI and overall design needs lot of improvement. So Rediff users may be not using other languages for other reasons like bad interface.

India has 29 languages that are spoken by more than a million people (2001 Census).  There is definitely a need for providing Internet service in Indian languages to reach a wider user base in the country. Indic Computing is a project to provide computing resources in Indian languages. There are other technology intitatives around Indian Languages.