It is my pleasure to introduce and endorse T Santosh for the role of Vice-Chair for the EAI Working Group.

Some of you probably already know T Santosh, who is Scientist “E” of the Indian Ministry of Electronics & Information Technology (MeitY) tasked with dealing with matters related to Internet Governance, Internet Protocols, Digital Inclusion and Multilingual Internet. In his role as a senior government official, he is very familiar with Universal Acceptance.

In T Santosh’s own words, here are some of his qualifications:

• Actively involved in undertaking activities related to promoting the cause of multilingualism on the Internet in India on behalf of the Government of India.
• Actively involved in engaging on behalf of MeitY jointly in partnership with NIXI and C-DAC in order to take up the work related to the representation of Indian Languages in the non-ASCII characters. As a result of this .Bharat is now available in all 22 scheduled languages covering 10 scripts.
• Actively involved in leading the cause of dissemination of the efforts multilingual internet ecosystem including Neo-Brahmi Label Generation Panel (NBGP) Members.
• Presented as a keynote speaker at several events on multilingualism, organized by ICRIER, C-DAC, etc. speaking on the ways and means of popularizing IDN’s , EAI and Universal Acceptance. 
• Working actively through various groups and committees at ICANN towards building the rules for secure and stable definition of the top-level domains for scripts used globally, so that people with no knowledge of English are able to go online and access the websites with the Internet domain names completely in their languages. All this is likely to contribute greatly towards Bridging of the Digital Divide and make it easier for the next set of billion new Internet users, a large part of which is going be non-English speakers from India, to access and make use of the Internet in their own local languages. 
• Involved with the project to Promote Devanagari script on the Internet which is implemented by the Internet and Mobile Association of India (IAMAI), under which we have organized 6 Universal Acceptance Workshops in 6 different states of India.

T Santosh and I were able to chat at length about his work.  He also told me about the efforts of NIC.IN and C-DAC to develop EAI-compatible email systems.  These systems support over 100K government officials!  When they are fully upgraded, they will be great showcases for the multi-lingual Internet.  I am excited to think that our working group could contribute to their success.

I heartily endorse T Santosh for our Vice Chair role.  Please review his qualifications above and communicate your support either privately to me or on the public list.

Thanks!

/marksv