The one thing I have come to understand is that many native speakers of Indic languages are effectively illiterate in their own language. The combination of highly educated people being functionally illiterate had me talking with many people.

From http://blog.wikimedia.org/2011/11/28/7983/

//Many well educated people, people with a university level education are effectively illiterate in their own language.//

//When our goal is to get more people involved in the Indic languages, we can ask people to transcribe the scans of public domain books. We will be providing them with a keyboard mapping, the fonts that show their language. As these “illiterates” recognise the characters and reproduce them digitally, they learn not only to type their language they may even learn to read.//

I find the above lines not only very offending but also far from truth. The people you see in conferences do not the represent the whole of India. There exists a minority which did not learn mother tongues in their schools, but majority of the Indians do learn to read, write, speak and understand their mother tongues in schools. Most of the regional print and mass media are very active and surpass the readership for English language media.

Except for technical and professional higher education, most of the studies are still done in Indic languages. ( at least for Tamil )

If your ambition is to teach the mother tongues for the convent educated minority English speaking Indians through a Wiki project and then make them contribute in Indic language Wikipedias, it may never happen. I am not even sure if it fits inside Wikipedia's mission.

There are millions and millions of Indians who are versatile and are dependent on their mother tongues for knowledge. Wikimedia should think how to reach them directly.

Ravi