TeX in India

Looking Back, Looking Forward

Ajit Ranade
TUG 2002, Thiruvananthapuram

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 A
Geographic
Idea of
India

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 An Economic Idea of India
Strengths
• sustained growth at 6.4 for over a
decade (but recent slowdown)
• strong export potential, current
a/c deficit low
• healthy forex reserves
• low external debt
• low inflation regime
• political consensus on reforms
• deepening financial sector
• knowledge base advantage,
demographic surge
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Weaknesses
• fiscal deficit high, debt gdp ratio high
• fiscal situation of states worse
• inadequate infrastructure, huge
funding need
• unsatisfactory investment climate
• rising gap between rich and poor
states
• dependence on oil imports, monsoons
• slowing of reforms, coalition
compulsions
• social indicators below world average
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PPP GDP about US $2 trillion, fourth highest in the world

9 GDP Growth Trend

8
7
6

GDP Growth (%)

5
4 India
3 World
2
1
0
1995 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001

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 High Service Sector Growth

24.8

1990-91
Agriculture
30.9
53.3 21.9

2000-01

Services Industry
43.7 25.4

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 Indian Software Industry

accounts for about 2% of India’s GDP.

In FY01, its share was 1.5% of the global market
($387 bn).
In FY02, the size of the industry was Rs. 485 bn of
which exports accounted for 76% and domestic
software 24%.
India exports software to 102 countries.
An unexpected bonus of highly subsidised tech
education?

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 Size of Indian Software Industry (in Rs.bn)
500
450
400
350
300 Exports Domestic
250
200
150
100
50
0

FY02 (E)
FY95

FY96

FY97

FY98

FY99

FY00

FY01
FY02 (in Rs. Bn): FY02 Growth Rate:
Exports 369 Exports 30%
Dom. Market 116 Dom. Market 18%
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 IT Enabled Services
•Recently emerged as a major driver of software
industry
•Covers services like medical transcription,
customer interaction service, data digitization,
back office operations
•In FY02, showed 70% growth (Rs. 70 bn)
•Employs over 1,00,000 people
•Will account for 40% of all venture capital
investment by end of 2002
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 NASSCOM McKinsey Report 2002

Domestic Market
13-15
Product and Technology
Services 8-11

ITES Exports 21-24

IT Services Exports 28-30

0 10 20 30 40

NASSCOM Estimates for 2008 (in $ Bn)

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 TeX in India
• TeX Users’ Groups of India is 5 years old
• Possibly the biggest TUG (?)
• All 13 Indic scripts can be typeset in TeX (but
only 10 of 5000 fonts free)
• an estimated 8000 people work diectly on TeX
for their livelihood
• Research and font development work almost
totally done outside India in the past
• only one widely used TeX package done in
India (pdfscreen)
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 TeX and Scientific Publishing

• Market concentrated, estimated value US $15bn

• Elsevier share about 40%
• total exports from Indian vendors for publishing
as a whole is US$ 100m, doubled in 3 years
• Scientific publishing much smaller part
• Training is a main bottleneck
• TeX may be loosing to newer technologies

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 Some TeX India case studies
• Universities, research institutes
• Medialab Asia, Homi Bhabha Centre
• Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy
• TechBooks
• M.G. Antarrashtrira Hindi Vishwavidyalaya
• Focal Image India
• MacMillan, Thompson Press

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 Indian Readership

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 Readership Surveys
• Sources NRS and IRS
• growth more than 10%, high in the Hindi
belt
• 180 m readers, Kerala 70%, Bihar 15%
• average exposure only 16 minutes to media
• Dainik Bhasker, Jagran now largest dailies
• readership of dailies growth faster than
literacy growth during 1999-2002
• 48% readership in 6 lakh villages
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 Outlook for Readership
•major book producing country
•greatest English language book buying potential in
the world
•growing literacy, edu institutions, and purchasing
power
•248 m adults are literate but do not read any
publication.
•FY03 may see a 20-25% sales growth in
publishing

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 TeX in India: Looking Ahead
• Increasing marketshare in publishing,
higher billing rates and volumes
• Catering to domestic publishing demand
• technical documents in Indian languages
• standardised encoding for all Indic scripts
• Prof. Vidysagars’s vision - right-click on a
ps file to transliterate in any Indian font
• Open Type fonts for all Indic scripts
• TeX development from India
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 TeX in India: Looking Ahead (contd)
• Marriage of Unix/Linux localisation with
TeX, also merge into Indic-computing
effort
• same language subtitling
• e-books, simputer, text-to-speech
• training and outreach (the travelling TUG
secretariat, summer schools)
• leveraging open-source (a la sunshine and
solar devices)
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