Babel doom, Indic boom

An explosion in Indian language content, technology and back-end support will power internet accessibility for the next billion users in India

- K. SUNIL THOMAS

WINTER SOLSTICE, WHEN the sun is farthest from the northern hemisphere, is usually the coldest day of the year. At the DailyHunt headquarters in Bengaluru, however, winter solstice 2020, which fell on December 21, was anything but cold. The new media startup that aggregates news and content from various content providers was basking in the warm glow of success. Its parent company, VerSe, had just been adjudged a unicorn.

What sets apart DailyHunt is that it operates completely in the Indian language space, providing content collected across 14 languages. Interestingly, the latest round of funding of $100 million—which pushed its valuation beyond the magical $1 billion mark—came from Google and Microsoft for the company’s Josh short video app. A statement by the company described itself as “India’s first tech unicorn for local languages”.

It may be the first, but it will not be the last unicorn success story in the Indian language space.

In the summer, the Internet & Mobile Association of India (IMAI) announced that for the first time ever, rural internet users had surpassed urban users—22 crore, compared with 20 crore in cities. In 2021, Hindi internet users may overtake English users. KPMG says that three-fourths of India’s internet users by 2021 will want to access content in Indian languages.