The company has decided to hunt local talent at engineering colleges and provide them necessary technical support for development of applications with interface in any Indian languages.
As a first step of this contest, Microsoft has reached out to the students directly through technical festivals at the IITs in Delhi and Mumbai and other prestigious institutions, to create awareness about the contest.
"With only 5 per cent of India's population being English literate, it is imperative that technology be available in the local languages to truly make an impact at a mass level.
With this latent need in mind, we conceptualised 'Project Bhasha', a collaborative programme to engage with Indian governments, academia, industry and local developers for promoting local language computing," Raveesh Gupta, senior product marketing manager, localisation, Microsoft Corporation India said in a release.
Towards delivering on this objective, we are actively working with various academic institutions today such as universities of Banasthali and Mysore and the Indian Institute of Science to involve the student community in development of local language applications, he added.
The 'Indic Developer Challenge' has already received good response from students from over 1000 students. Microsoft hopes that more and more students would register for the new contest over the next few weeks.
