The state government on Monday launched an open-source software, partly developed by IIT Kharagpur, that will facilitate reading, writing and computing in Bengali.

Baishakhi Linux, being open source, is open to selective customisation by users.

The operating system, developed by the Society for Natural Language Technology Research, an initiative of the state information technology department, is to be extensively used in administrative work.

Individual users can also download the software free of cost from www.nltr.org.

“Computer communication and information technology are part of our daily lives. We need to bridge the gap between people and technology and for that we need a technology that understands the language of the people. Bengali Linux serves the purpose,” said Dwijesh Dutta Mazumdar, the president of the society.

The operating system, created in collaboration with the IIT, Kharagpur, and MAT3 Impex, a Japanese firm, will allow office work and other computation in Bengali.

One of the problems of developing Bengali software is that there is no corpus of words in the language. Baishakhi Linux will try to create a corpus of Bengali words, said a developer.

State IT minister Debesh Das, who unveiled the operating system, said Bengali Linux would be the backbone of e-governance.

The government is planning to provide Internet-enabled computers to all 3,500 gram panchayats and set up 6,000 information kiosks across the state.

“We plan to take the Internet to the block level by October and to all gram panchayats in the next one year. The kiosks will be set up by then,” said Das.

The West Bengal State Wide Area Network, which will link up the kiosks, has already reached the gram panchayats in Burdwan. All kiosks and computers up to the panchayat level will function on Baishakhi Linux. “Training sessions for the employees will start by the end of the month. The training will be a mammoth task,” said the minister.

The society is also undertaking a number of other projects to take information technology to every Bengali-speaking individuals.

The other initiatives include a Bengali dictionary and a wordlist to be developed by the Bengal Engineering and Science University, a Bengali spell-checking system to be integrated with Baishakhi Linux, a search index for Bengali literary works and posting Rabindra Rachanabali on the society’s website.