pakhibagai

Agree completely. The Government of India, State Government of Tamil Nadu and Rajya Marathi Vikas Sanstha are actually institutional members of the Unicode consortium which makes decisions on behalf on India. Safe to say this has not gone well for Indians since the companies who are full members choose to ignore the basic encoding requirements for Indic languages. And oh, the membership fee to Unicode for full votes starts at $12,000 per year.

By the way, could you check out the Swalekh Android keyboard app and give me your honest feedback? Disclaimer: I work for Reverie and we made this keypad.

During Nasscom Product Conclave this year someone mentioned that more than 60% of WhatsApp messages are in local language (Phonetic or Native typing mode).

Not quite - Swalekh is a local language + English keypad app with native and phonetic modes. You can type a Kannada word in English and have it translated to Kannada script. It also ensures you don't mis-spell and has a low footprint on mobile phones.

Granted that India has structural issues. Which country doesn't? A good look at the American presidential election 2016 tells us all.

Yes, the Unilevers and the P&Gs of the world did a great job at understanding India and customizing their products. (And then Baba Ramdev came along with Patanjali!)

Incidentally was on a call with the CEO of Scripbox today who mentioned that he had to innovate his KYC/documentation process for the Indian market as people wanted the convenience of having it picked up vs. couriering it themselves.

However, getting back to the point - very few companies other than the FMCG space cater to non-English speaking/ local language users in India. Localization is key to India, but for some reason largely overlooked as of now.

"I've always felt having so many languages has hurt India more." - why? Many languages are dying in India and that's just sad - every language lost erodes identities, stories, and diversity. However, more and more people are moving to 'link languages' like Hindi, Tamil, Bengali etc. The challenge is to ensure all local language users are treated equal in India

And then there is a 3rd category of companies: Startups that do well and get complacent post funding.

Case in point: Furlenco

On supermarkets only 1 player seems to get it right as of now - Hypercity. Maybe Amazon will kill it in the next 5-10 years