It is matter of great pride that today on the occasion of Tamil New Year day, Ministry of Communications and IT is releasing products for use in Public domain for Tamil language.

In the follow up of mission of TDIL, language technologies developed so far under various projects supported by DIT through various Resource Centres and CoILNET Centres are being aimed for product development. These projects have been in the area of Indian Language Processing Tools, Human Machine Interface Systems, Translation Support Systems, Corpora, Lexical Resources and Speech Technology. As a first step in this direction, fonts, basic word processing and OCR software developed in classic language Tamil are being released in public domain. I hope these tools will be of utmost use for people to communicating in their local language and at the same time trigger localization of e-governance initiatives.

This is just the beginning; similar efforts will be extended for all other Indian languages. More tools & utilities would be made available for general use. The endeavour would be to put them in public domain , receive feedback based on actual usage and define the roadmap for future research and development in this arena.

Brijesh Kumar