In fact redirect pages are very much required for each wiki article. We never know what all keywords people will use to search for wiki articles. All the possible keywords should be made redirects.
In fact if you are not creating the redirect page India for the article இந்தியா in Tamil wiki, then that is very bad from reader's perspective. Yesterday I was introducing Tamil wiki to one of my tamil friend. The first word he typed in search box was India. We can't expect people to know typing in Tamil when they come there only for reading. Same case applies to all articles across various Indian language wikis.

Each Wikimedia project shall have its own redirect policy.

In Tamil Wikipedia we discourage non-Tamil redirects and allow only redirects that make sense.

I think what we need to do is make the MediaWiki search smarter and not end up adding lakhs of redirects.

An ideal way would be to have two APIs combined :

1. Google transliteration API (or any other similar thing):

Transliterate the input to Tamil and see if an article exists.

2. An interwiki link API from English Wikipedia article title

If user searches for "India", then see if you have interwiki link for Tamil Wikipedia in that page.

So, the search logic will be:

* Search for article title matching the keyword.

If not present,

* Search for a transliterated title

If not present,

* Search for an interwiki link

else,

* Do a content search ( not article name search ) matching the transliteration.

Well, that's an idea for geeks to consider :)

Ravi