India’s Internet to create over 50 million jobs by 2021

According to a new report Reverie Language Technologies, the growth of Indic language consumers online will lead to the creation of over 50 million jobs, mainly based on the demand for digital content in the Indian language across various platforms.

Arvind Pani, CEO, and Co-founder of Reverie Language Technologies said, "It is important to build the Internet for India to empower the Indic language user. Currently Indic content online stands at .01 percent compared to Chinese, which makes up 16 percent of content online. An increase in Indic languages on the Internet will cause an immediate impact on India's businesses and economy."

He further added, "To enhance India's digital economy, the government and the private sector need to work together to develop top-notch digital school curriculum in Indic languages."

The report said that, digital literacy in Indian languages can be achieved starting from schools, the first step being training educators to read and type digitally on Indic keypads, preparing them to teach these skills to students.

A large captive audience already exists for content in regional languages. Over 50 crore Indians use Hindi for their daily communication, while only 0.06 percent of websites are in Hindi. This shows a huge mismatch between demand and supply.

Even a small percentage of each language's speaker base makes for a huge user base. For example, 7 percent of Telugu speakers mean 7 million users. This is a huge market for any industry - with the growth in Internet reach and the decrease in Internet prices; people are consuming more digital content in their own language.

If both government sectors and private players partner up to ensure the development of the Indian Internet, the adoption of Internet services by Indian language users could potentially generate 53 million livelihoods by 2021. This is calculated assuming a job to user ratio in India of 1:10 and local language Internet user population of 536 million by 2021.