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In the modern age, a revolutionary progress is seen in the field of Information Technology, but due to different reasons a little work is done for Sindhi in this field.
In 1990, the Modular Innovators Pvt. Ltd. Pune, developed the script Master DTP programme in the Arabic Sindhi as well as Devanagari Sindhi for D.T.P work. The programme has been upgraded and included in ‘Shree Lipi’ - a Windows Compatible Multilingual Solution’ - one of the most popular font packages for Indian languages. At present, it is being used by almost all publishers of Sindhi books, magazines and newspapers as well as for the personal and official correspondence in India.
At the C-DAC (Centre for Development of Advanced Computing) - a society under the Ministry of Information Technology, Government of India, has evolved the GIST (Graphic and Intelligence based Script Technology), which is considered the pioneering technology enabling the use of Indian languages in the field of Information Technology. Sindhi is also included in this programme. In the beginning, dot based fonts were developed and included in the programme, which could not become popular due to many limitations. After that, laser based fonts are being developed by the C-DAC.
The GIST Caters to various families of scripts. Each family of scripts shares a common keyboard and code.
A common code facilitates instant transliteration between the scripts. Its terminals also allow all the Indian scripts to transliterate to their corresponding Roman Script.
At present ‘Nashir’ - a Windows based application capable of handling scripts written from right to left i.e. Arabic, Persian, Urdu, Sindhi and Kashmiri is being developed by C-DAC. It enables viewing of multiple documents at the same time, which facilitates to use Urdu, Sindhi etc and English text, all in one text frame. Its storage format uses PACII (Perso-Arabic standard for Information Interchange) to save dots. It supports Unicode also.
In Sindh (Pakistan), for the first time, the Sindhi Software for D.T.P was developed by Macintosh in 1988 A.D. It was used for publishing Sindhi books and newspapers. Microsoft Company introduced windows based Sindhi software in 2000 A.D, which can be used for printing, E-mail and composing web page and publishing it on the Internet. The programme can be downloaded from the website (http//communities.msn.com/ Sindhi computing Resources /Welcome. msnw). Some other experts are also working in this field in Sindh.
At present in India, the Sindhi software programmes are mainly used for composing and printing only. There is a great scope to develop a number of computer based programmes in Sindhi, i.e. preparing Electronic dictionaries, grammars and other instruction material, using it for automatic transliteration and translation. Sindhi culture and literature can also be popularized through Internet.
Some projects are undertaken by different agencies. Two projects are worth to mention here. First, A Computer Assisted Study of South Asian Languages (which also includes Sindhi) - a collaborative Japanese project has been undertaken by CIIL and ILCAA which basically aims to present a linguistic analysis of the languages with a view to prepare dictionaries and grammars and other instructional material of Indian Languages V/s Japanese for Japanese learners who wish to learn these languages. Secondly, The DOE – TDIL Project to computerize a large corpus from the different domains of current Sindhi to study the language change and other aspects.
The potentials of Information Technology can be very useful to strengthen the diasporic solidarity among the Sindhi speakers scattered all over the world.
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