In the founding years of HP Labs India (HPL India) in 2002, the lab had a Department of Language Technology and Applications to research and address language barriers to adoption of Information and Communication Technologies in countries like India. Prof. A.G. Ramakrishnan, Dept. of Electrical Engineering, Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bangalore, was then working as a Principal Research Scientist with this department, on leave from IISc. The research team at HPL India felt that the lack of publicly available high-quality linguistic data in Indian languages was a major barrier to research in this area. They proposed the idea of initiating a major data collection activity to aid research in technology for Indian languages, similar to the Linguistic Data Consortium (LDC) at the University of Pennsylvania. This idea was supported by Dr. S. Ramani and Dr. Gita Gopal, the then Director and Associate Director respectively of HP Labs India. This was later also enthusiastically endorsed by Dr. Kris Halvorsen who was the Center Director at HP Labs, Palo Alto.<

HP Labs India felt that, while they will actively contribute to the creation, this effort would be best spearheaded by an Indian national institution. It was felt that the Government of India would offer some form of support to this activity, because of its significance to national languages. The initial draft proposal for the creation of a Consortium was put together by Prof. A.G. Ramakrishnan and Ms. Kalika Bali with contributions from others in the Department such as Dr Sriganesh Madhvanath, Dr Sitaram Ramachandrula and Dr K.S.R. Anjaneyulu. Dr. S Ramani suggested that Dr. Rajeev Sangal, Director of IIIT, Hyderabad could be the Principal Investigator of the project, being a senior researcher in the language technology arena. Accordingly, a joint proposal was finalized. In addition to Prof. A G Ramakrishnan, Prof. Pushpak Bhattacharya from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Bombay, and Prof. B Yegnanarayana from IIT Madras agreed to serve as co-investigators of the proposal. Finally, as per the suggestion of Prof. Rajeev Sangal, Dr. Uday Narayan Singh, then Director of CIIL, was also added as a co-investigator.<

HP Labs India suggested convening a meeting involving all the major researchers in India in language technology to decide the various aspects of the linguistic data collection prior to submitting this proposal to the Government of India. The venue for this meeting was chosen to be CIIL, Mysore and HP Labs India fully funded the meeting in the second week of August 2003. HP Labs India invited Prof. Aravind Joshi and Dr. Mark Liberman, Director of LDC, University of Pennsylvania, for the meeting at Mysore at HP Labs India’s expense. A follow-up meeting was conducted at IISc, Bangalore with a number of key researchers, including Prof. N. Balakrishnan, Chairman of Supercomputer Research Center, IISc, where Prof. A G Ramakrishnan summarized the discussions at the Mysore meeting. Subsequently, the proposal was finalized and submitted to MHRD by Prof. Uday Narayan Singh.<

This consortium, being set up on the lines of the LDC at the University of Pennsylvannia (USA), does not only create and manage large Indian languages databases, it also provides a forum for researchers in India and other countries working on Indian languages to publish and build products for use based on such databases that would not otherwise be possible.