The Centre for Developing Advanced Computing (C-DAC) has a strong national presence in the field of R&D. C-DAC is currently taking a lot of initiatives to bridge the digital divide between rural and urban. Srinivasan Ramakrishnan, director general, C-DAC, discusses with Biztech2.0 the organisation's roadmap for making the nation tech-savvy.

C-DAC (Centre for Developing Advanced Computing) has been taking a lot of initiatives in the regional language computing space. Can you elaborate some of them?

It is our constant endeavour to increase adoption of computing among the masses in India. We have been working towards developing regional language computing technologies for the last two decades. We are also tying up with private partners to develop various facilities in the mobile space like Text-to-Speech(this makes the reading out of text messages possible), Natural Hindi and some more solutions based on Open Source.

We have developed a regional language-based search engine also. In a country like India, where there are multiple languages prevalent, it is very essential to develop this kind of a portal. Recently, we have added Gujarati to our list of regional languages. Cross-lingual search engines are not available at present. Keeping these facts in mind, we have developed the above search engine. Our team is also working on sophisticated tools to enhance natural language processing and semantic Web dynamics with our partners. We have also started discussions with handset manufacturers to take the development of mobile applications to the next stage.

What difference will the regional search engine, launched in conjunction with the Government of India, make to the rural poor?

C-DAC has developed the search engine with help from the Department of IT (DIT). The 'India Development Gateway' portal will help the rural population by giving them information related to five important sectors –agriculture, health, rural energy, education and e-governance. In the days to come, we have plans to add more sectors to the portal according to the demand of users. Around 10 people from C-DAC have been working on the ‘InDG’ portal for the last one-and-a-half years along with the DIT. There are provisions for six languages already and plans to add more in the future.

Multiple stakeholders are involved in this initiative. C-DAC has a network of 90 partners, which is our USP. This particular initiative will provide credible information about various products and services to satisfy the strategic needs of the rural people. There are facilities for content generation and content management in the portal. Rural masses can take the help of this portal to access all sorts of relevant information.

What are the projects C-DAC is working on in the e-governance space?

We are working on various e-governance projects in order to bridge the gap in technology. We have actively participated in the Community Service Centre project. We have also developed various solutions to help land record management, GIS-based planning, telephone revenue billing, computerisation of municipal corporations, Election Commission projects, State Legislative Assembly projects, hospital information systems and eCommerce projects of various government departments. We are also working with the DIT to develop various standards and to automate the working of government agencies. We also work with state and local bodies to extend the e-governance initiatives to reach end-users.

What are the updates on the High Performance Computing front? Could you elaborate on other focus areas of C-DAC for this year?

We have a strong R&D team in place and we are working to increase the processing capacity and usage of other applications in our supercomputer PARAM. The key focus areas for the coming year include high performance computing, bio-informatics, cyber security, embedded systems, real-time systems, multi-lingual and multimedia computing, broadband wireless networks, open source software and ICT for healthcare, agriculture and education. We have already released BOSS (Bharat Operating System Solution) 2.0 and have plans to release BOSS 3.0 also later this year.