Knowledge Webs
for
Smarter
Citizenship
Knowledge Webs
for
Smarter
Citizenship
Knowledge Webs for Smarter Citizenship
Today, India speaks at least 19,500 different languages but just 121 languages have more than 10,000 speakers. More than 74% of India’s 1.4 billion+ population are literate. Contrary to popular perception, just about 11% of the Indian population speaks some level of the English language & barely 4% has fluency enough to read a full page of English text. But more than 98% of the Indian literate population have fluency in one of the other top 12 scripts used in India. According to the census, the mother-tongue breakup is as follows – Devanagari 47% (Hindi, Maithali, Urdu etc), Eastern Nagari (Siddham-Bengali) 8%, Nagari (Modi/Marathi) 7%, Telugu 7%, Tamil 6%, Nagari (Gujarati) 5%, Kannada 4%, Malayalam 3%, Odiya 3%, Gurmukhi 3%, Assamese 2% and Kashmiri Persio-Arabic 1%. One thing which unites all of these Indian scripts is that they are uniquely arranged on the same phonetic 56 character Varna-Mala, regardless of their language family ( Indo-European, Dravidian, Tibeto-Burman).This makes them distinct from the English language's Roman script. The usage of a 26 character Roman script to express a 56 character Varna-Mala script is an avoidable loss of knowledge.
Prarang aims to fill this Indian script content gap for the localized content by selecting the largest & important towns (District Headquarters/Capitals) of India, on the basis of the above, national level script (written language) ratio estimated by the census. Some of target towns are as follows –