Internet Revolution

The Internet revolution is yet to happen in India, like the way it has happened with cell phones and cable TV. While it's common to see everyone from auto drivers to senior citizens with cell phones, you will rarely find an auto driver who visits a cyber cafe to check his email. This has to do with opportunity cost involved in spending time in cyber cafes and most importantly the lack of services to target a large part of India. The Internet too largely uses American Standard Code for Information Interchange. This alienates many communities from the boon of computers and Internet. The fact remains that most of India's billion people are denied access to the Internet and not only because they don't have a connection or a computer. The digital revolution is leaving them behind because they don't speak English, the dominant language of the Web. Even if there is room for further growth among English-language users in India, far greater growth could be unleashed. Hindi is the world's third or fourth most widely spoken language. Yet it is not even in the top 10 languages on the Internet. A recent trend of regional content is preferred by more and more Internet users. It is recognized that the content has to be in a language that is understood by many users. In the Internet space, this is highly unbalanced currently. 12 out of 6,000 popular languages spoken globally account for 98% of web content, with English most prominent among them.