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298 Kenneth Keniston

speaks English in India,” by which of course they mean that the
present market consists of people who speak English. If this is ac-
cepted, then to produce a localized version of a major operating sys-
tem or office suite in Hindi would not only be extraordinarily
expensive but useless, since “all computer users speak good En-
glish.” The same is even more true for other South Asian languages,
because each of them has fewer mother tongue speakers than Hindi
and other Indian languages.
A related economic factor is the prevailing export orientation of
the Indian software industry. To be sure, both the software and hard-
ware associations of India have put localization at the top of their
list of priorities. They insist that the great expansion of computer
and Internet use to come in India will be domestic. If it is domestic,
of course localization is required. But in fact, the orientation of the
highly successful Indian software firms has been, so far, service-
based, export-oriented, and therefore English-language based. One
of India’s greatest assets, reproduced in no other developing country,
is its vast number of highly educated English-speaking computer de-
signers and programmers. For this reason alone, nations like China,
Russia, and Brazil, whatever their other strengths, will continue to
find it difficult to compete with India in the software field.
These economic factors are powerful and in the short run deci-
sive. But I am reminded of the story told by Harsh Kumar, the in-
ventor of the localization system known as BharatBhasha. He tells
of the two shoe salesmen who go to a remote Indian village with a
population of one thousand people. The first salesman returns to his
home office depressed and discouraged. “It is hopeless,” he says,
“there isn’t a single person who wears shoes in the entire village.”
The second, however, returns jubilant and optimistic. “A wonderful
opportunity,” he says, “we can sell a thousand pairs of shoes.”
Kumar insists that in the case of vernacular software, the ab-
sence of demand is created partly by the absence of supply. To take
his favorite example, there are in Bombay hundreds, indeed thou-
sands, of Marathi- and Gujerati-speaking merchants who own two or
three shops and who currently spend every night until midnight bal-
ancing their books. They have the means and the need for computers
that could do the job for them and get them home three hours earlier.
But they do not have the command of English necessary to use any
of the existing English-language small business packages. Computer
consultants to whom they might turn can only offer English-language
solutions, which are useless for the Marathi- or Gujerati-speaking
merchant. The absence of supply automatically means the absence of
demand.