Does India need its own vernacular internet?

India has 22 official languages, excluding English, each of which has millions of speakers.

88 percent of Indians can’t speak English (let alone read it), yet when you look at the languages on the internet in India, it’s only in English.

Hindi is used by less than 0.05 percent of websites on the internet, Bengali less than 0.018 percent, Tamil less than 0.007 percent, and so on. I hope you get the drift.

I have thrown a lot of numbers up till now, but the ultimate point is this:

99.9 percent of the internet is in languages 90 percent of Indians don’t understand. Is it possible to make a “Digital India” without changing the language of the internet?

Far from infinite, the internet seems to be only as big as the languages you speak. For a non-English Bengali, it is just a few government sites, news sites, apps, and movies on Youtube. However, a couple of new generation startups have started their local language versions.

I tried living in this pond for the last week and the experience has been highly frustrating. I changed my Android system setting to Hindi (as that’s the only other language I know), changed my Keyboard to Google Indic Keyboard, and tried avoiding all English content that was thrown at me.

Here are a few things I realized in this eye-opening exercise:

• No SwiftKey for Hindi. This is the first thing I realized. (I also realized how much I’ve taken SwiftKey for granted in my life.)
• Content creation in English is indeed 90 percent faster than in Hindi.
• There’s no camera app for Hindi. I can’t use the filters and lenses on Instagram or Snapchat without bumping into English roadblocks
• A lot of apps that I took for granted don’t exist for vernacular users. Zomato and Swiggy don’t exist in this small pond.
• I can do google searches, but the results in Hindi are very limited, and no meaningful information comes out of them.

Let us now look at some of the most in-demand digital categories and how vernacular is faring in our most popular startups’ priorities.

Ecommerce

Snapdeal is the only ecommerce company that offers their platform in multiple languages. Earlier this year, they launched their multi-lingual mobile web interface in 12 languages. However, their mobile app and desktop website are still only in English.

Neither Flipkart nor Amazon offers multi-lingual support at the moment. Even companies in the long tail of commerce such as Shopclues and Craftsvilla are currently only available in English.

Paytm does allow for multi-lingual support upon changing the language of the phone but only for certain sections of the website.

Travel and transport

Leisure and entertainment

News

Games

Challenges

Opportunities