It's All About Script

Can't Read English? There's a Phone for That. Thanks to Three Iit Classmates (From Far Left: Akash Dongre, Rakesh Deshmukh, Sudhir Bangarambandi), English Is No Longer a Barrier to Using Smartphones.

- Hindol Sengupta

“I’M FROM INDORE,” Rakesh Deshmukh tells me. “It’s in Madhya Pradesh.” He grins sheepishly when I tell him I do know where Indore is, but the fact he thinks he needs to explain is telling. Most people who have lived their lives in the metros have just a foggy idea of other cities. But this is not a story of the other India. It’s not even the story of how three college-mates developed Indus OS, a multilingual operating system for mobile phones that has become more popular than Apple’s iOS. Rather, it’s the story of how those three students turned what’s widely seen as a disadvantage—not understanding English—into a phenomenal business success.

The story of Indus is about the impact of one language in a post-colonial society and how the yearning to use and access that language can transform a business. In fact, to me, the Indus tale is as much about the English language as it is about an operating system.

It sounds a bit like those “inspiring stories” you see all over social media, but sometimes those stories are true. “Our entire business model is based on the lessons from what we saw around us,” says Sudhir Bangarambandi, CTO of Indus OS, and one of the founders. “Language was the biggest challenge.”

Akash Dongre, chief of product and operations and the third founder, adds: “Our breakthrough idea was not to think of language as another app or service in the ecosystem but to think of the entire ecosystem as dedicated to solving the language problem.”