Bangalore, May 29 :

Leaving behind the rivalry from the cricket pitch and border disputes, individual techies from South Asia are increasingly looking at the possibility of working unofficially and jointly to build computing solutions that could benefit people on all sides of the border.

Local language computing is a major headache for South Asia and initiatives are coming up on this front. After working on the fairly successful Ankur project between hackers in India and Bangladesh, there’s a growing push to work on Urdu-based solutions between individuals and small institutions in Pakistan and India.

Ankur-at bengalinux.org-invites volunteers, saying, “Ankur is involved in development based often on cutting edge technology. Ankur developers were the first to come with a Bangla Open Type font, and the Ankur Bangla Live CD is often considered to be the best among the localised Live CD distributions out there.” A live CD is an operating system - and other software - stored on a bootable CD or DVD that can be run directly from the CD or DVD drive, without being installed on to a hard drive. But there’s a huge task ahead, with computing geared largely for the simpler 26-character based English language, and South Asian languages still struggling to find local language solutions in computing.

Pakistani techie and campaigner Shahzad Ahmad says, “Urdu is not only the national language of Pakistan but is among top 22 largest spoken languages in the world. But Urdu still doesn’t have a suitable, free and easy-to-use HTML editor, Urdu email software, a messenger and freely available fonts.” After working computing in other major languages -Tamil, Hindi, Gujarati, Telugu, Marathi, and Malayalam - Indian tech skills are keen to join hands and work on Urdu.

“At IndLinux — a volunteer group pushing for Indian language solutions in computing — we hope to collaborate a lot more with Pakistan,” Ravikant from Sarai.net told a South Asian meeting recently held in the Bangladesh capital Dhaka.

The Internet is helping to share experiences. Nepal ‘s Madan Puraskar Pustakalaya (MPP), the principal archive of books and periodicals in the Nepali language (with some 30 million speakers), was stuck when it wanted to electronically catalogue its collection of books some four years ago. “So, it started developing Nepali software, says Bal Krishna Bal, project manager of its PAN Localisation Project.

Existing Nepali fonts lack data processing facilities and uniformity in terms of keyboard mapping of the Nepali characters, making typing Nepali very difficult. So MPP evolved ‘Unicode’ - an encoding scheme that assigns unique code to every character of standard writing scripts of the world, making typing in Nepali very simple to learn.

“A larger Nepali population is deprived of using computers because of the language barrier, So, MPP targeted developing an operating system in Nepali and localised software applications in Nepali,” says Bal.

Some 30 months of work lead to the creation of NepaLinux, supported by the Canadian International Development Research Center (IDRC) and administered by the National University of Computers and Emerging Sciences, Lahore.