The India Internet Governance Forum (www.indiaigf.in) is the first such event being held in India.
The idea of the conference is to bring together all stakeholders related to policy making about the internet.
So far, the Forum has held 11 pre-events in collaboration with:
- IIT Bhilai
- FICCI and other industry partners
- Jayshree Periwal Group of Schools
- JECRC
- The Innovation Story – a start-up focused on STEM training in India
- The Children’s Post – a start-up focused on ensuring that children in all parts of India have equitable access to news and knowledge content.
A curtain-raiser event was also held on October 21st.
India is home to 1.2 billion mobile phone users and 800 million internet users. It is the largest market outside USA for most tech giants like Google, Facebook, Twitter, etc. But global rules related to the internet do not take care of India’s needs. For example, India has 19,000 dialects, 121 languages, and 22 recognised languages. Yet, majority of the internet is still in English. Only 11% of email servers support Hindi. The other languages find even less representation.
Through the India Internet Governance Forum, the Ministry of Electronics and IT, FICCI (Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry), and other stakeholders (people to whom Internet policies and rules matter) will come together to discuss what policies should be made so that the internet is made suitable for users in India and meets their needs.
The next event is a three-day webinar in November 2021.