I am happy to know that on the occasion of Tamil New Year's day, C-DAC (Centre for Development of Advanced Computing) is organising this event for releasing products for use by masses in Public domain for the classic language Tamil.

Information Technology (IT) has emerged as an enabling tool to bridge knowledge gap by facilitating acquisition, absorption and communication of knowledge. In India where English literates are less than 5%, there is also need to overcome language barriers. For rapid economic development, national priorities ought to include 'knowledge for all' and 'moving up the knowledge chain'. There should be a continuing effort to tap global knowledge, assimilate and create knowledge of local relevance, to make it available for the benefit of people at large. It is also required to motive private sector through market incentives to contribute to this critical area

In this context, this is a welcome to release the fonts, basic word processing and OCR software developed for Tamil in the public domain. I hope it will be done for all other Indian languages also. This will encourage people to work using computers in their own languages.

I extend my best wishes for these endeavours.

G.K.VASAN