Does India need its own vernacular Internet?
Note: This article was earlier published on Tech In Asia and LinkedIn.
There are over 900 million websites on Internet.
There are over 4.4 million apps in the app stores (2.4+ million on Google Play Store and 2+ million on Apple’s App Store)
There are 490 million Hindi speakers in the world. 215 million Bengali. 88 million Punjabi. 75 million Telugu.
India has 22 official languages, excluding English. Each of which have millions of speakers.
88% of Indians can’t speak English (let alone read).
Yet, when you look at languages of Internet in India. Its only English.
Hindi is used by less than 0.05% of websites on the internet. Bengali less than 0.018%, Tamil less than 0.007% and so on. Hope you get the drift.
I have thrown a lot of numbers till now. But the ultimate point is —
99.9% of internet is in languages 90% Indians don’t understand?
Is it possible to make a “Digital India” without changing the language of Internet?
Far from infinite, Internet seems to be only as big as your language. For a non-English Bengali, it is just a few govt sites, few news sites/apps and movies on Youtube. A couple of new generation startups also started their local language versions, the ones who are finding it difficult to scale past their initial 40–50 million target consumers.
I tried living in this pond of Internet for the last 1 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). I changed my Keyboard to Google Indic Keyboard and tried avoiding all English content that was thrown towards me.
Few things I realised in this eye-opening exercise:
- No Swiftkey for Hindi (This is the first thing I realised. Also realised how for granted I took Swiftkey in my life)
- Content creation in English is indeed 10 times faster than Hindi (a fact that Virendra of Dailyhunt pointed out in a recent KPMG-FICCI Media report)
- No camera app for Hindi. I cant use the filters and lenses of Instagram or Snapchat without bumping into English roadblocks
- 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 search but the results are hindi are very limited and no meaningful information comes out of them.
Let us now look at some of the most used digital categories and how vernacular is faring in the list of priorities for our most popular startups.
Ecommerce
Snapdeal is the only e-commerce 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 offer multi-lingual support at this point of time. 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 phone. But only for certain sections of the website.
Travel and transport
In the cab hailing space, while Ola doesn’t have a multiple languages, Uber does change its interface based on mobile OS setting (Android in my case).
In the travel space, both Makemytrip and ixigo have their train apps in multiple languages. However both their main apps are still only in English. No other travel app I could find which supported any Indian language. Even IRCTC official mobile app didn’t (their website does support Hindi though).
Leisure and entertainment
This is a category in which vernacular users do have some relief. But that is not because of any Indian startup but two big global apps (incidentally part of the same company) — Whatsapp and Facebook.
Whatsapp is available in about 10 Indian languages. It changes its language depending upon the language in the phone. It also has a crowdsourcing platform for its language translations.
Facebook similarly changes depending on system language. It is available in 12 regional languages.
It is no surprise that they have managed to reach even the remotest of parts of the country.
Facebook claims to have 155 million monthly active users and whatsapp 160 million.
Whatsapp has nearly become ubiquitous in India right now, about which I wrote about some time back. It is the go to source for commerce and media content consumption as well.
Apart from these two giants, back home Bookmyshow offers support for 5 indian languages.
They have for long been the go to app for movie ticket booking for english educated elite. Now with their regional language foray, they plan to get to the next set of indian internet users.
Very recently apps like Sharechat and Pratilipi are trying to tap in the same market but the verdict on them is yet to be out.
News
This is probably the only category in which certain standalone players have made it big (or at least seem to).
Facebook and Whatsapp do tend to provide the daily dose of content but more organised news apps like DailyHunt and UC News are also getting a lot of love from vernacular users. Both of them have more than 10 million downloads on Play Store.
InShorts very recently has also started with Hindi news. Most of the offline newspaper companies also have vernacular websites which get millions of hits themselves.
Of all the segments, news seems like the only segment where the needs of vernacular users haven’t been ignored completely although there’s still a lot to yearn for.
Games
Although I couldn’t find any significant vernacular language game in the play store. There are quite a few casual games that are fairly easy and intuitive in their gameplay. Games like Candycrush and Subway Surfers seem to have the same addictive effect on vernacular users as they have on English users.
There have been a few other games made specifically for Indian tastes like variants of Teen Patti (by Octro as well as Moonfrog) and Chhota Bheem but the vernacular aspect still is missing in them. While vernacular users still get a steady supply of casual games, there is virtually no serious/strategy game in the market for them.
Challenges
There are multitude of challenges which this digital language divide possesses.
Vernacular users and their opinions don’t get expressed on the internet.
Digital Language Death researcher Andras Kornai claims that 95% of all languages in use today will never gain traction online. According to him, it is a real danger that new users, influenced by the volume of content in more dominant languages, will abandon their mother tongues online. This seems to be happening to a lot of vernacular users already.
In 2011, UN declared access to internet as a basic human right. Seems like it is being dominated by a certain elite only. On internet, dominant languages tend to get amplified and end up largely speaking for those with less powerful voices.
But is it possible to bridge this digital language divide?
There are quite a few arguments against it.
Bi-lingual users, who can understand english partially will always prefer Internet in english because of the clear advantage of using English because of its vast reach.
China has a lot of platforms specifically built for Mandarin. They have been able to make their own versions of Google, Facebook, Twitter and Youtube primarily because of the language. That has been possible in China because less than 1% population speaks English in China, whereas the number stands more than 10% in India. Many argue with the aspirational aspect of English in India, it is virtually impossible to create separate vernacular platforms for India. Language alone can’t be the differentiator.
The other argument put is that the vernacular consumers are not monetisable. Very recently, Mohit Bhatnagar of Sequoia Capital put forward excellent data points countering the myth.
It is pretty clear that advertisers have found local language consumers to be a better TG in the offline space (TV,Films and Newspapers).
While percentage share of advertising spend in local language is 86% for TV, 86% for films and 64% in newspaper, it is only 5% on digital.
Where does the opportunity lie then?
In a recent talk, Kevin Bharti Mittal pointed out that while media talks about hundreds of millions of mobile internet users in India (anywhere ranging from 250mn to 350mn), we have no more than 90 million real internet users.
50 million mobile users are on full monthly data packs and 30 million use sachet data packs regularly.
With data becoming cheaper (with the introduction of Jio and lowering of 4G data prices), many proclaim that new users will come on board. I think it will be virtually impossible for them to come on board unless full fledged self serving native language apps are not provided to them.
Technology and mobile apps will always remain an alien concept to them until it becomes something they understand.
For the next 500 million to come online, there is no option but that. DoT has already made it mandatory to have local language support in smartphones from July 2017. Companies like Google (with its Indian Language Internet Alliance) are paving the way by making Indic Keyboard, local language fonts and Unicode standard to provide the base for content creation and discovery.
Few ideas that come to mind:
Needs
- Improve business productivity : Initiatives live DD Krishi Darshan and DD Kisan and their success easily point towards a pent up demand for bridging the regional language information asymmetry in agriculture and farming. Millions of Whatsapp communities also point towards a need for organised channels for promoting trade in vernacular.
- Banking and payment services: The success of MFIs in not just rural but urban consumers clearly show the potential and demand for banking solutions. PM’s Jan Dhan and current stride towards cashless economy provide the perfect launchpad for the next wave for banking and payment solutions to be built in vernacular. Last mile banking solutions also seem to be an open space ready to be disrupted in a way users understand.
- Employment : English has become almost a pre requisite for employability in India. National Skill Development Council has recognised english as an essential skill to complement over half of 21 core skills. Plethora of opportunities lie in vocational training, employee training as well as employment. The same job portals that brought jobs to the english speakers over the last 2 decades won’t suffice the unique needs of this section.
- Education: Given the digital divide and aspirational nature of English (further amplified by Internet), english learning becomes a no-brainer opportunity. Companies like Hello English are capturing this huge user base beautifully. While Indian english users have their BYJU’s and Toppr, local language learners have to rely on just physical books for their learning needs. All the waves of personalisation and interactivity that is disrupting the education category is yet to reach the regional language medium learners.
Wants
Entertainment
- Various content players have started creating video content in Hindi (TVF and AIB) but other regional languages still lack digital entertainment content to consume.
- Success stories like Unilever’s Kan Khajura also seem to show how entertainment hungry the real India is. It is very hard to come up with any other service in India which has more than 45 million subscribers.
Ecommerce
- Vernacular reviews based social and curated shopping network (aggregating all e-commerce products and their reviews)
- Audio/video based assisted e-commerce
Content Creation
- Camera app allowing users to associate their favourite film/TV content to their images/videos. Dubsmash does allow for something similar with videos but much more innovations seem possible.
- Keyboards that allow for easier Indian language input. Initiatives like IIT Bombay IDC’s Swarachakra seem to be a direction in this step
All the challenges and gaps I mentioned above could become opportunities for new-age of startups to tap into. It is time we saw platforms built for indian languages. If typing in Hindi is 10 times harder, it is time we make it 100 times easier by using image/audio/video to communicate (or make an easier keyboard itself). If no good Bengali fonts exist, lets make them. If no Telugu camera app exist, lets make one which puts global players to shame.
Timing can never be better than this. Smartphones sales at all time high and data prices getting cheaper by day, we literally are left with no excuses.
Disclaimer: The facts and opinions mentioned above hold true as of 13th December 2016.
