Does India need its own vernacular internet?

(Vernacular - "Language of the slave").

It's far more complicated that "need its own vernacular internet". The internet is an emergent thing, and what one sees are just the symptoms. This is also the reason India's literacy is so low (even compared to Africa/Middle East).

If India wasn't a linguistic apartheid regime, we'd already have seen a native ecosystem which is lacking quite badly. This needs fixing at the state and political levels, which I have exactly zero hope of ever happening. This despite having some nauseously xenophobic organizations like ShivSena (in Maharashtra), the DMKs (in TN), the KaRaVes (in KA). This is in addition to the "nationalistic" organizations like RSS and BJP at the central level.

These orgs are essentially vehicles which instrumentalize the widespread disaffection from the apartheid state, in order to put themselves in power (Advani's use of Ayodhya is a nice study). If you study their policies carefully however, you realize they plan to do precisely nothing that is the cause for the inequity.

This is not different from the independence movement, where a bunch of Brown folk wanted to run the colony.

Digital India, be in no doubt, is meant for the 200 million Brown sahibs, who do know English. The rest are peasants who have been at the losing side of the inflationary system today, and of the cruel taxation system of the British, kept at bay via endless subsidies (a dog hardly bites a master ?) and mutual bickering.

There is zero empathy from the former class, and these pretentious people are the source of endless pain for the red-pilled; it is very disappointing to live in communities where the kids start speaking English before anything native, and worse when the state hold such clones in such high regard.

May kek not have mercy on the clones (apologies for the 4ch lingo).

Technical:

I think Sailfish has better localization than Android. Keyboard is a disaster everywhere, since no one in India uses native language keyboard/input. They are very rare, if at all available, and next to no one knows they exist - it's in fact easier to find such resources in the US than within in India. Swarachakra is too crowded and very very information inefficient (unlike the 5-vowel Japanese system its based on), which leads me to believe even their creators don't use it actively.

The lack of feedback means that the ITRANS layout is very very bad, and unusable (xkeyboard moth-balled most layouts due to disuse).

Again, the roots of the problem lie with the education & state policies that are reinforced via state violence. China gets this right because India is a colony & it isn't.

(Downvote all you want clone people; सत्यमेवजयेत् !)

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12237411

I am not sure if I subscribe to the findings of this article completely. Popular English language words have made their way into almost all Indian languages. When you are accessing the internet, unless you are reading long articles or online books, all you need is passing reading ability of some English words to get through. To say that Instagram doesn't have a Hindi equivalent of "filter" is simply missing the point - "filter" itself is called "फिल्टर" in Hindi which has the same English pronunciation and many people will get that. Also, many of my friends communicate with me in Hindi by literally using English alphabets but writing Hindi sounding words - another thing which the author fails to mention in his article.

I agree to the first point you mentioned. In certain utility apps like payments etc this would hold true. In an internet without words i.e. images and video that would be true as well. But currently a large part of internet we use is text. Case in point, this article itself and this discussion. With the current technologies we have, for most part of Hindi speaking users, it is easy to speak in Hindi but very difficult to type in it.

As per using hindi words in english alpbhabets, my argument is - majority of India can't even read or speak english, how will they type in English? A lot of your friends do that because Hindi input is very hard and we need better tools.

Agree with the fact that automated translation is making progress but not fast enough. It is very hard to understand context still. The efforts are being to made to bring these 500 million users online now, and an english internet is being shoved on them.

So, are you saying in the long run Devanagari as a script will die but Hindi as a language shall remain. Pretty interesting point. Seems like this is the direction we are going as well.