India needs to localise its e-content if the country has to witness more and more people embracing the internet. This is because most of the local population that can speak English are already on the web. The good news is that a good start in this direction has already been made by some enterprising entrepreneurs.

Hindi search engine raftaar.in is encouraged by the response it's been getting on its trial runs. "We receive around 5,000 hits everyday and will launch the beta version on August 15," says director Peeyush Bajpai, who's enthused enough to launch the engine in Tamil, Telugu and Bengali eventually.

Other vernacular efforts include Hindi websites for email (epatra), live cricket scores and astrological services (Prabhasakshi), matrimonial (JeevanSathi's Hindi version) and content aggregation (Samachar.com).

Google has a Hindi interface, Microsoft has plans for a Hindi edition of MSN.com and Wikipedia already has a Hindi version. Sify has multiple Indian languages option, while rivals, such as Rediff, allow surfers to mail in Hindi. (Source: Financial Express)