Jhargram-based civil engineer Kunar Hembram has developed a smartphone application which will help you to type Ol Chiki messages to send SMS.

Kunar, though a civil engineer and self employed in Jhargram in West Bengal has worked to develop this application in smartphones for the last couple of years. The new application was launched by Kunar, literateurs of the tribal community at a function. Jamshedpur East MlA, Raghubar Das was the chief guest to launch the innovative project.

Being a civil engineer, Kunar has been associated with various Santhali literary organisation which made him work towards the language. In 2001 he had also developed a script conversion software which can translate English, Hindi and Bengali to Ol Chiki and vice-versa.

" It was my dream project. I worked for around two years on this application and came up with the language in SMS. All you need is to just transfer the application, install it in your smartphone and use in messaging. The biggest challenge for us is to make Ol chiki script famous among our youths.

The present generation is waning away from their rich values and tradition, which is a matter of great concern. Unless we teach them the importance of Santhali language and literature they would not take interests," he noted.

He went on to add that there is a need to make the language job oriented so that a person who gets well versed in the language is able to get job.

Availability of Santhali books in the market was another important issue that was raised during the session. The speakers were of the opinion that books on Ol chiki script should be easily available in the market At present, one has to get the application from Kunar himself. To make it more popular, Kunar will soon upload it on the Internet for others to download it. The software is equipped with automatic spell check measures. However, one needs to have the application installed to make the script legible on phones. Once installed, one can switch to Ol Chiki from English as some does with predictive text (T9).

Addressing the gathering, Raghuwar Das said that though Santhali is a language spoken by the Santhals, a tribe living in Jharkhand, West Bengal and Orissa it is also spoken in some parts Bangladesh and Nepal.

Being an Austro-Asiatic language, it had no script of its own. It was usually written in either Devanagari or Bengali Script. Recently, there has an attempt to introduce alphabets, called 'Olchiki' in the language.