On September 8,2009 Six Language “Software Tools and Fonts” CDs are released by Government of India, Ministry of Communications and Information Technology. Bangla is one of these six languages. There are two Bangla CDs in the pack - one of them contains systems and tools developed by TDIL and CDAC as well as Unicode compliant tools contributed by SNLTR ( Society for Natural Language Technology Research) and the other CD contains the bilingual (Bangla and English) operating system named Baishakhi Linux, developed solely by SNLTR.

     SNLTR (Society for Natural Language Technology Research) is a society set up by The Govt. of West Bengal with the objective and mission of building up the foundation of localization technology and Natural Language Processing Technology. It is an autonomous society seeded and funded by the government, that is dedicated to develop standardized tools and systems and deploy them to the grassroot organizations like the Panchayats, so that the rural, non-English savvy people are no longer deprived of the benefits of information technology.

          In today’s program, Hon’ble Minister, MC & IT Thiru A Raja released these CDs. Dr. Debesh Das, Patron of SNLTR and Hon’ble Minister-in-charge, DIT, Govt. of West Bengal handed over Bangla CDs to the dignitaries. Shri R Chandrasekhar, Secretary DIT and Shri R T Joseph, Director General, C-DAC were also present in the program.


      In a multilingual country like India, Language Technology builds the base of grass-root level nation building, by empowering the common people to access information and communicate in the e-medium in their local language. The TDIL (Technology Development for Indian Languages) mission by the Govt. of India has taken up the task of development of Language Tools for all Indian languages.

     The Govt. of West Bengal realized the necessity of building up the foundation of localization technology and natural language processing technology and building e- applications in Bangla to make e-governance a reality for the common people in West Bengal and the neighboring states. The Govt. of West Bengal has set up the Society for Natural Language Technology Research (SNLTR) with this objective and mission. It is an autonomous society seeded and funded by the Govt. of West Bengal, that is dedicated to develop standardized tools and systems and deploy them to the grassroot organizations like the Panchayats, so that the rural, non-English savvy people are no longer deprived of the benefits of information technology.

      We felt that it is essential to adopt a standard for all such developments, to make the systems inter-operable across platforms. Presently, the tools that are available for local languages follow different standards of their own and consequently a document developed by one system is often not readable in other systems, unless the required specific software is available with the reader. SNLTR has decided to adopt Unicode 5.0 and above for all the developments. In adherence to this standard, SNLTR has developed the required fonts for rendering and different keyboard layouts to serve as the input mechanism. The users may select the keyboard layouts of their choice and irrespective of their choice all the data will be stored in the Unicode 5.0 format, that can be read and edited through any machine, since all the systems now has adopted that standard. SNLTR is also a full voting member of the Unicode consortium and its representative attends and suggests different modifications to the international standard. We have been able to convince the Unicode consortium to adopt the term Bangla instead of Bengali. Other suggestions of SNLTR are under consideration.

    We are very happy that TDIL has recognized our effort and such a release of the tools, developed by TDIL with CDAC and those with SNLTR are being done together. This cohesive way of development and sharing of efforts is essential for technology development in India, where there are too many and too difficult tasks to be done. This can only achieved through such co-operation.

   The Bangla CD that will be released today has tools and systems developed by both TDIL(CDAC) and SNLTR. All the software and tools contributed by SNLTR are Unicode 5.0 compliant. The SNLTR components include

   A) Baishakhi Keyboard Layout

   B) Soft Keyboard of Baishakhi

 C) Two Unicode compliant Fonts (Vidya and Bangla Akademi). The Bangla Akademi font, developed by SNLTR, is presently the only transparent font in Bangla.

   D) A set of code converters for users. Such converters will enable conversion of legacy documents to the Unicode format easily. The contents in the present Government portal “Banglar Mukh” has recently been made fully Unicode compliant using such converters.

  E) The full open-source bilingual operating system Baishakhi Linux 1.0 which is also being offered through this release.