The non-availability of a majority of government websites in Kannada was decried at a session on Kannada Technology at the 83rd Akhila Bharata Kannada Sahitya Sammelana in Mysuru on Sunday.
K.A. Dayanand, CEO, Bengaluru Rural Zilla Panchayat, regretted that a majority of government websites were not available in Kannada despite a direction issued by the government in this regard.
A study by Kannada Development Authority (KDA) had found that barely 25% of the websites had the option to switch to Kannada, said Mr. Dayanand, who was till recently the Director of Department of Kannada and Culture, Bengaluru. He called upon the government to bar websites that do not have the option to switch over to Kannada from being hosted on the e-governance server. “Merely issuing a letter to have the Kannada option in the websites will not work. They should not be allowed to be hosted on the e-governance server,” he said.
Later, Mr. Dayanand said the National Informatics Centre (NIC), a Union government undertaking, handles only a very small percentage of State government websites. A majority of websites are developed by the respective departments and hosted on the e-governance server, he added.
During his address on problems of implementation of e-governance, Mr. Dayanand regretted the failure of the departments to use Unicode developed by the Department of Kannada and Culture for reading files sent in different fonts and formats. Even though the State government had issued a notification more than five years ago to all government departments to use the Unicode, atleast 50% of the departments had failed to adopt the same.
This Unicode can be downloaded from the website of the Department of Kannada and Culture – www.kannadasiri.co.in. The Unicode was developed to overcome the use of Kannada in computers. “If a file in Nudi software was sent, the receiver having a Baraha software or other software was unable to read it,” he said.
So, the departments and agencies, who had not downloaded the Unicode software, will not able to read the files sent in Unicode. This, Mr Dayanand lamented, was affecting use of Kannada in computers. “When a file is sent in Kannada, the sender receives a reply asking for the file to be sent in English,” he remarked.
