Ireland could suffer as India crosses digital gap

Net Results: Colonialism may have died out in the 20th century but its effects still live on in many spheres of life and culture. One of those is the computer industry where the US and European roots of the industry are often clear to see, writes John Collins.

Those of us living in the West may take it for granted but if you want to use a PC - or most other modern forms of technology - in the 21st century you need to use the Qwerty keyboard. It was patented in the 19th century and, while there are competing layouts such as Dvorak's system, they are all designed for speakers of languages with Roman characters.

That, of course, presents problems for speakers of languages written with different alphabets, such as those in Asia, Africa and the Middle East. Travel to countries in Asia whose languages use Indic scripts such as Thai, Burmese and the 15 official languages in India and you will see keyboards with additional characters printed on top of the keys of the standard layout. Native speakers have to learn a tortured combination of key combinations in order to access these characters.

It comes as no surprise then that these regions are also some of the lowest spenders on technology products. And, on the flip side, tech vendors are not willing to develop products for local languages if they feel there isn't a market for them.

The PhDs staffing the research labs of technology giant Hewlett Packard in India are all relatively fluent in English, as you'd expect of India's educated classes. Their brief is to research new technologies for India's estimated one billion population that may also have applications in other populous and developing nations.

They are acutely aware that the digital divide in India almost exactly mirrors the divide between those who can speak English and those who can't. There are 68 million English-speakers in India and some 53 million people who can be considered PC literate.

In fact, according to Ajay Gupta, director of HP Labs India, it can take up to four months for a Hindi speaker to learn how to use a modified Qwerty keyboard.

Gupta and his team believe the standard keyboard Qwerty is one of the main barriers to wider adoption of technology in their country. They have conceived an alternative input device, the gesture-based keyboard, which is designed for easy use by speakers of Indic languages. They claim that literate Hindi speakers can learn to use it in less than 15 minutes.

Hindi, which is spoken by 400 million people, has 36 consonants that can be modified by 12 matras and almost every consonant can be bound to another. This gives approximately 1,500 combinations.

The GKB consists of a graphics tablets and an electronic pen connected to a PC running handwriting recognition software. In addition to the standard keys such as space, enter and delete, the tablet has 36 squares representing the consonant sounds. The user taps the required consonant and then modifies it by writing the required matra above, below, or to the left or right of the consonant directly on to the tablet. During tests input accuracy has been as high as 98 per cent.

The GKB may sound good in theory; in practice it has already made a significant difference to a small number of Indians' lives.

In field tests it was given to a Mr Charandas who runs a rural roadside kiosk in Bangalore state. He has a PC and an internet connection and makes his money by filling out state forms and other data entry tasks online for the local farmers. Since he started using the GKB his income tripled from 40 rupees (72c) a day to 120 rupees (€2.16) because of the increased amount of work he could process.

Irish and European technology company executives often dismiss India as a low-cost location, ideal for call centres or software coding "factories" but not somewhere that real innovation takes place. They might not state it so boldly but the implication is that, as long as Ireland moves up the value chain by securing research and development investments, as well as supporting our indigenous software start-ups, we can stay one step ahead of emerging locations such as India, China and Eastern Europe.

However, HP, one of Ireland's largest tech employers with over 4,000 staff on the island, has located one of six HP Labs facilities worldwide in India and not in Ireland (although it did add a research function to the inkjet manufacturing facility in Leixlip recently and its Galway software development centre is leading HP's research in a number of areas). Its researchers point out that it is addressing potentially huge developing markets.

What's abundantly clear from seeing Gupta and his team demonstrate the GKB and some of their other innovations is that Indian researchers can come up with technology just as good, if not better, than that emerging from Ireland, Europe and the US.

Technology entrepreneurs on this side of the globe who fail to notice that India is now a real competitor on all levels, and not just for outsourcing, do so at their peril.