Vernacular Report, 2012 It was a report of the Internet and Mobile Association of India (IAMAI) which was released recently. This report affirmed the fact/stereotype that English communication is an urban phenomenon and that local languages are more popular in rural areas. According to the report, 1) A higher percentage of rural people are aware of regional language content than urban users 2) In India, 45 million users access content in the local language. 3) Around 64 per cent of rural Internet users (24.3 million active users out of a total 38 million) use the Internet in the local language. 4) But only 25 per cent of the total 84 million urban users browse the Net in regional languages (20.9 million). 5) In rural areas, the report shows a bias in favour of sites offering government services, land records and private initiatives such as eChoupal, which provides aggregated information of interest to farmers and facilitates sale of farm produce. Internet non-users have mentioned that lack of content in local language as one of the major reasons, along with lack of infrastructure. 6) With a low working knowledge of English in India (according to the National Readership Survey, 2006, only 18.2% of the population is English-literate; 34.2% in urban and 11.1% in rural areas), Internet penetration in India is only 12%, since content is primarily available in English.
Posted on: Sun, 16 Jun 2013 06:11:06 +0000
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