Microsoft pledges support to India

Microsoft Corporation India announced a strategy aimed at supporting the Union Ministry of Communication to bridge the digital divide in India. The announcement followed discussions between Minister of Communications & IT, Dayanidhi Maran and Bill Gates, Chairman and Chief Software Architect at Redmond, the IT major's headquarters. 

Microsoft will partner with the Ministry of Communications & IT in six strategic areas including driving PC penetration, accelerating IT literacy, ensuring affordable access to technology in rural areas, ushering in e-governance. The rest are enabling Local Language Computing and creating a secure IT environment.

Microsoft has also announced the launch of a multilingual Windows XP Starter Edition for India. 

"Today's announcements by Microsoft including the launch of a new multilingual Windows XP Starter Edition for India are steps in the right direction. The various steps announced today address important issues like IT literacy, taking high-quality, interactive IT education to schools in India, availability of local language computing solutions and e-governance," said
Dayanidhi. 

“There is an urgent need to enable affordable access to locally relevant IT applications at a broad level. I believe that through effective private-government partnerships we can deliver on this objective." 

Elaborating on the announcements, Bill Gates said, "We are delighted to be working with Dayanidhi towards our common goal of bridging the digital divide for people across India. In particular, I'm excited about the promotion of e-Governance technologies, the expansion of teacher education and broadening our Windows XP Starter Edition for India offering to better meet the needs of Indian citizens." 

Also, the collaboration between Microsoft and the Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In) enables the Government of India and the IT major to engage in cooperative security activities to address threats to national IT infrastructure security and public safety more efficiently and effectively.

The 30-year-old IT major said, “In response to customer and partner feedback, we are pleased to announce plans to deliver a multilingual Windows XP Starter Edition for India, designed for speakers of any of nine Indian languages who may also want to use English.”

To help accelerate IT literacy, Microsoft will work with the government to pilot a new approach to
ICT-based education and extend this project to all districts in India. 

It will invest in an e-governance centre in collaboration with an Indian institution to undertake pilot e-Governance. To promote local language computing the company will further strengthen its countrywide initiative, Project
Bhasha, a comprehensive program focused on providing local interfaces for Microsoft's flagship desktop offerings Windows and Office in 14 Indian languages. 

Microsoft will collaborate with the Government of India and the Indian scientific community to conduct research in Indic language computing technologies. This will include areas such as machine translation between Indian languages and English, search and browsing and character recognition. 

Under the rural kiosks initiative, Microsoft will support the government and rural entrepreneurs who are participating in the program in establishing 1,00,000 Common Service Centers in the country. 

Microsoft will offer a range of products, services, consultancy, training and support as needed to rural entrepreneurs. 

It will also share its research findings regarding critical success factors for the establishment of rural kiosks with the government and the agency designated by the Government of India for this purpose, Microsoft said in the statement.

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