Panini is a new multilingual Keypad system for India supporting 11 languages of India on the Mobile phone. The Panini keypad system when installed on a cell phone allows the user to type conveniently in Hindi, Bengali, Telugu, Marathi, Tamil, Gujarati, Kannada, Malayalam, Oriya, Gurmukhi (Punjabi) and Assamese. There was no such easily usable means to type in a regional language of India available until now. Mobile penetration in India is high with phones having reached those segments of society who are unfamiliar with the English alphabets and hence had no way to utilize the texting applications of the phone.

This new Mobile Texting technology called Panini named in the honour of the well known ancient Sanskrit Grammarian who lived 2500 years ago, is from a Noida based Indian startup myMobile Ergonomics.

Panini allows one to compose a text message in a regional language of India, and send it to any other phone as a low cost SMS. Panini also offers SMS compression which increases the standard payload of a single SMS from 70 characters of Unicode to about 240 characters of Indian language text in a single message for the same cost. This opens up new possibilities for cost effective Mobile marketing and meaningful Information enabling applications for rural India over the ubiquitous SMS. Mobile phone penetration in India is very high with about about 336 million active mobile phone users. And growing at over 10 million new users per month in the past months.

Panini also offers automatic transliteration between the languages of India in the manner that a person can write a message in Hindi and send it in Malayalam, a language of Kerala in South India. Or receive a message in Tamil and read it in Gujarati. This would be helpful in a country of many languages. Indian language scripts typically use many characters not all of which are used equally frequently and the Abiguda scripts are full of ligatures which follow complex rules of usages.