The Ankur Bangla Initiative is a collaborative effort aimed at bringing Bangla (or Bengali) to the Free/Libre Open Source Software desktop.
One of the challenges facing modern societies is the prospect of ensuring equitable distribution of knowledge. The draft proposal for the World Summit for Information Society (WSIS) accepts that governments, agencies and NGOs face an uphill task in ensuring that the digital chasm is bridged with the greatest number of people being provided access to technology and technological benefits.
One aspect of crossing the digital divide is to create an IT aware culture. Such a movement should have its base at the grassroots level in order to ensure that the benefits are available to all. Free/Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS) models provide an ideal base in utilising Information and Communication Technologies for Development (ICT4D). As a part of such models, localisation
(L10n) of the GNU/Linux Operating System provides an unique opportunity to create an OS that is culturally aware. Such an OS reflects the cultural nuances and conventions of the end-users. At the same time such an effort is also robust and scalable enough to be deployed in enterprise wide implementations. Integration of such L10n efforts with globally accepted standards and conventions lead to the creation of a complete suite of products and technological infrastructure that can be utilised and used in many applications.
The Ankur Bangla Project is a collaborative initiative aimed at bringing Bangla to the FLOSS desktop. Comprising of volunteers, developers, translators, graphic artists, linguists and technocrats from India, Bangladesh and other parts of the world, the Ankur Bangla Project aims to make Bangla Computing possible. The core objective of the Ankur Bangla Project is to make available a completely localised GNU/Linux OS. Simultaneously it provides a scalable and standardised technological infrastructure for Bangla Computing.
As an initial release of the work completed so far and to provide a glimpse of the scope and possibilities of the project, the Ankur Bangla Project has released a
AnkurBangla LiveDesktop v1.0 (Technology Preview). Incorporating all the work that has been done on the
Gnome Desktop Environment (a popular desktop environment of the GNU/Linux OS) as well as elements that provide a functional computing environment, the AnkurBangla
LiveDesktop provides a preview of the completely localised GNU/Linux OS planned for release during February 2004. Showcasing the project in a LiveCD format has the obvious advantage of allowing a greater number of users to use it for evaluation purposes. On a very minimum hardware specification (which conforms to those currently available as Commercial-Off-The-Shelf configuration), the entire localised Bangla GNU/Linux OS runs off the CD and provides for a wholesome computing experience. For those who do possess the bandwidth, the ISO image of the OS (to be thereafter made into a CD by burning the image file) is available for download from the project home at
sourceforge.net.
For a project that is only around 10 months old, the incremental releases of the CD has seen downloads crossing the
400 mark. Numerous CDs have also been distributed by the volunteers on a personal level based on request.
The Ankur Bangla Project is based on the classical F/L OSS model of software development. It is completely voluntary and a (till date) non-funded effort. The L10n project ties in well with initiatives in the domain of e-governance, Low Cost Computing as well as other ICT4D projects. The Ankur Group is thus in a collaborative discussion with various stakeholders in such initiatives including major vendors like RedHat, IBM etc; the
Government of West Bengal; academic institutions like
Jadavpur University, Indian Statistical Institute; WEBEL among others.
The Ankur Group also participates in the standards creation process by providing inputs to Gnome Core,
Unicode Consortium, Indic Consortium and FOSSI. Such involvement ensures that the technological expertise and insights gained by the group are shared and made available to be replicated in other L10n projects. Contributing to the global knowledge pools has been one over-riding feature of
F/L OSS models and the Ankur Group considers itself an important contributor to such knowledge repository.
Other projects that are concurrently taken up by the group and pursued in tandem include:
Bspeller - a spellchecking program and a dictionary
xponjika - a 'ponjika' and a calendar program
Lekho - a multi-platform editor and document output program
Bangla Gutenberg - an archive of public domain works in Bengali (similar to the Project Gutenberg effort)
A Localised Low Cost Computing (L2C2) framework and accessibility program involving Text-to-Speech in Bengali are also in the development phase.
For further details and clarifications, please feel free to contact ::
Sankarshan Mukhopadhyay
Member, Ankur Bangla Project
sankarshanmukhopadhyay at vsnl dot net
sankarshan at bengalinux dot org
This page is available for download in plain text format here, scanned images of newspaper articles from The Telegraph and The Hindustan Times
