With a huge figure of 500 million Hindi- speaking people in the world, this platform offered like- minded individuals to connect and share thoughts in the form of blogs, posts and forum questions in the Hindi language.

Amitesh Misra, Kaplnesh Gupta, and Nikhil Tiwari, came up with an idea to generate content for Hindi internet surfers and do business out of it. And, therefore, the trio came up with a social networking site in Hindi – The ShabdaNagari.

With a motto of promoting the national language, It showcased at the first-ever Indian Language Digital Festival- Bhasha, on March 11, 2016, in New Delhi. It was supported by the Ministry of Culture, Government of India, along with exclusive language partner Reverie Language Technologies.

The Evolution

ShabdaNagari started its seed from SIDBI Innovation and Incubation Centre, IIT Kanpur. They helped the team with the initial loan to start operations. Also, this January, ShabdaNagari raised a fund of 1.2 crores from Kanpur Angles and other investors.

Before starting the idea of ShabdaNagari, the team has also worked on another project, called Society, under IIT Kanpur’s umbrella. It was a social media management, analysis, scheduling, and monitoring tool.  The tool helps people to manage Facebook and Twitter campaigns efficiently.

The project Society was developed by the duo- Amitesh and Nikhil before they started on ShabdaNagari. The two then later joined in a bigger team to lay the foundations of ShabdaNagari. The concept of this project was initially taken to schools and colleges of Kanpur, and that is how it started to gain popularity. Marking growth for ShabdaNagari, it now boasts more than 20,000 registered users on its portal.

Leveraging the Platform

ShabdaNagari is furnished with a handful of tools handy for the users to post articles, pictures and videos in Hindi. This is a free platform for the users where users can create their profiles, manage friends and followers and even can enjoy an online chat or message just like any other social platform.

The platform also has a solution if the users have no knowledge to type in the Hindi font. ShabdaNagari allows you to type Hindi words in English, which are automatically translated into Hindi. The efficient algorithm allows real-time translation is providing users with a variety of Hindi input options.

In the past one year, the tool witnessed more than 7.5 lakh visits with an average session duration of more than five minutes per user. They also analyzed that more than 80 % of traffic comes from Mumbai and Delhi and 10% from other countries. The app also witnessed 1500-2000 downloads.

The Future Plans

The highly motivated team targets to achieve a five-lakh user base in the next few months and 1.5 million by the year 2018. Additionally, the new version of ShabdaNagari is likely to have advertisements, paid promotions, and marketplace for buying and selling Hindi books as revenue streams. Also, the new version is expected to provide five options to input Hindi text using two separate keyboards- Inscript and Remington.

The team also plans to offer Hindi input choices in the form of APIs, so that users can also use these for their websites. Also, they plan to offer digitized versions of vernacular books in association with various educational and Governmental institutes.

Digitized Hindi Content raised opportunities in Future

Indian internet consumer preference has witnessed a continuous upsurge. According to Google India, online Hindi content consumption has seen tremendous growth as compared to English content. This is expected to rise in the coming years. Also, to address the needs of Hindi speaking audiences in India, many businesses have taken initiatives and are offering local language technology solutions. These ideas have attracted the attention of many investors.