Harsh Kumar, a senior Railway Officer, presently deputed as Advisor - IT, HPCL, dreams of taking computers to every doorstep by localizing application software interfaces. He has developed a software, called "Susha", which will enable people to compute in their own regional language. To create multilingual user interfaces and dramatically increase market reach he is giving away his fonts for free and they can be downloaded from his website, www.bharatbhasha.org.

Mumbaibest had the opportunity to talk with Harsh Kumar, to know more about his new software and future plans.

Bharat Bhasha, an organization headed by you, started in 1997 gained tremendous response. Tell us, how it all began.

Over the years scripts of few languages became non-non existent, like Konkani and Sindhi. The excess use of Hindi and English, lead to this gradual transformation. Script is nothing but a means to put the meaning in paper in a way that people can understand and communicate. When script is removed, half of the literature, language and history is gone. Foreseeing, that one day we might have to write Hindi in roman script, due to excessive usage of non Indian languages in our day to day life, we initiated the movement called Bharat Bhasha, with the cause of using Indian languages on computers.

It is a non profit organisation which emphasizes on computers programming and coding in regional languages. If France, China, Russia could do it, then we should have have done it years back, as we have the best of technical skill. We Indians do not have faith in ourselves and we tend to believe something is wrong with our language. To change this notion we started to work with like minded people and this is how the organization was established. It is our own effort with our own money.

Shusha is the name of the font that you have introduced, which is a way to work on computer in Indian languages. Is it different from the softwares that were developed prior to Shusha ?

There are organizations working towards building Indian script. Each body adopts a different technique for representing Indian scripts in software. Shusha is a new way to work on computers in Indian Languages. For using Shusha no additional hardware or card is required. One can use it to work in Windows and on Linux. At present it supports Hindi, Marathi, Gujarati, Gurmukhi and Bangla languages. It is a new system of keyboard layout also. It is a combination of Phonetic, Graphical and Roman Indian systems. One can intuitively learn it in minutes. Anyone familiar with the keyboard can start working in Indian languages in minutes. We introduced Shusha to prepare Indian language front-ends for ones applications so that people who do not know English can also use Computers.

Was the Government supportive towards this movemnet ?

Adoption of Indian languages by the computers was a dream. Technical developments over the years convinced people that this is one of the simplest applications. CDAC, the government body, started working on it long back. Now localization of computer usage has become the mantra of the new millennium for every state.States like Punjab, Tamilnadu, Hyderabad have started working on it. Government has been equally encouraging for our efforts.

You are talking about taking computers to every single village. A country like India where only 7 % of the population uses computers, do you think this Bharat Bhasha movement will work ?

We are aware of the illiteracy level in India, and considering that we are talking about having intermediaries who can pass on the technical details and information that is required for fast growth and developement. There are a handful of people in India who are technically well equipped, and that is the section who can read and write English. That is why we have started talking about use of different languages in computers. We are thinking not only about students who are in Mumbai or in other metro cities, but interiors, where computers have just reached. It is impossible to provide jobs to the younger generation only in state capitals or abroad. We have to offer them a job at their native place, and that can only be possible if the software or the hardware are customized and region oriented.

India is a country where dialect changes with every two steps. Is it really possible to workout the applications based on all the regional languages ?

India's population is larger than any developed country. Going by statistics, Bengali is spoken by more people than Italian, then why not have computers which can understand Bengali. Issue is simple, do u think, computers can help, then why not make it work in your language. At present we have two options in front of us, wait for twenty years for our children to grow up learning English and the usage of computers, or get the software in the language we can understand today itself and work efficiently. I believe that the second option is the best.

What ways you have adopted to spread the message ?

Lots of the seminars and media coverage have generated good response for the software. This march it completed four years. The organisation tied up with the Nasscom and CII, and they helped us in putting up stalls in order to demonstrate the usage of the software. Gradually its getting covered and now its the new millennium mantra.

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