US-based publishing software firm Adobe is developing its popular Acrobat reader in Hindi and other Indian languages in an attempt to grab a chunk of the "multi-million dollar" opportunity in India's e-governance programmes.

"We want to develop the Acrobat reader in local Indian languages and have started work on this. Our research and development centre in India will be looking at short-listing the languages," Bruce Chizen, president and CEO of Adobe Inc said in Bangalore.

The Adobe Acrobat reader is already localised in 21languages across the world.  It is among the most widely found software packages with more than half a billion Acrobat readers currently in the world.

Adobe, which does business in 25 countries, has posted revenues of $ 1.3 billion.

The localisation of Adobe's acrobat reader in Indian languages is largely targeted at the government.

"E-governance will be the driver. In the short-term it (government) represents tens of millions of dollars opportunity," Chizen told reporters in Bangalore on the sidelines of the NASSCOM CEO forum.

He said work on the Acrobat reader had begun at Adobe's R&D centre in Noida and the product in Hindi and another language would be rolled out in the next few months. It has also announced that it will hire 100 software professionals over the next one year for its Noida centre.

"Opportunity is clearly the government. We are yet clearly not established (in India) to determine how big is the opportunity beyond the government," Chizen said, on India as a market even as he highlighted the rampant piracy of its products.

With large scale e-governance projects in various stages of implementation across India, the government is one of the biggest spenders on IT today. It is this constituency that Adobe wants to address with an Acrobat reader in key Indian languages so that governments can put their documents in a pdf format and make it easily available through the Web.

"We desire to be able to address large population of customers in various regional languages. When the government is connecting with the citizen, the format and language has to be current and we hope that an Acrobat reader in a local language will facilitate this," said Naresh Gupta, CEO, Adobe India.

Engineers India Ltd, the Maharashtra government and the Census of India are some of the three biggest customers of Adobe in India.

The Noida centre is set to emerge as the company's second largest R&D centre in the world, after its main facility at San Jose, California.

It already houses 250 software professionals and has contributed greatly towards Adobe's products.

In fact, many of the recent products to come out of the Adobe stable have been completely conceptualised, architected and developed in India.

All Adobe readers for handheld devices like Pocket PCs have been completely developed in India. Apart from this, core components of the Adobe Photoshop, Album, Pagemaker and Framemaker have been designed in India.

"Adobe has proven that India is more than just a services joint. It has great potential as a product development centre as has been demonstrated by Adobe's experience. We will continue to invest in our India centre not in services but for product development," Chizen said.

As a market, India does pose a big challenge for Adobe. Though Adobe's products are widely used, piracy is rampant and the company is unable to realise the revenue potential of its products in India.

However, piracy is not just a problem in India or a problem for Adobe. Worldwide the software industry loses $ 13 billion in revenues because of piracy. One out of four business software products being used worldwide are pirated.

In the US, piracy rates are pegged at around 24 per cent, while in India it is nearly 80 per cent.

Adobe's products while extremely popular in the country are also among the most pirated.

For instance, in Japan, where Adobe has a market share comparable to that in India, it will do revenues of $250 million this year. In India, Adobe will barely make $4 million while in China it is even less at $ 2.5 million.

Additional inputs from PTI