Today, India speaks at least 19,500 different languages but just 121 languages have more than 10,000 speakers. More than 74% of India’s 1.4 billion+ population are literate. Contrary to popular perception, just about 11% of the Indian population speaks some level of the English language & barely 4% has fluency enough to read a full page of English text. But more than 98% of the Indian literate population have fluency in one of the other top 12 scripts used in India. According to the census, the mother-tongue breakup is as follows – Devanagari 47% (Hindi, Maithali, Urdu etc), Eastern Nagari (Siddham-Bengali) 8%, Nagari (Modi/Marathi) 7%, Telugu 7%, Tamil 6%, Nagari (Gujarati) 5%, Kannada 4%, Malayalam 3%, Odiya 3%, Gurmukhi 3%, Assamese 2% and Kashmiri Persio-Arabic 1%. One thing which unites all of these Indian scripts is that they are uniquely arranged on the same phonetic 56 character Varna-Mala, regardless of their language family ( Indo-European, Dravidian, Tibeto-Burman).This makes them distinct from the English language's Roman script. The usage of a 26 character Roman script to express a 56 character Varna-Mala script is an avoidable loss of knowledge.
Prarang aims to fill this Indian script content gap for the localized content by selecting the largest & important towns (District Headquarters/Capitals) of India, on the basis of the above, national level script (written language) ratio estimated by the census. Some of target towns are as follows –
Prarang
Knowledge Webs
