About Baraha

“Baraha is dedicated to ANAKRU”

Baraha was developed (1998) by Sheshadrivasu Chandrasekharan with an intention to provide a free, user-friendly software to enable any non computer-savvy person to use Kannada language on computer. Other Indian languages such as Hindi, Marathi, Sanskrit, Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam, Gujarati, Punjab, Bengali, Assamese, and Oriya were added in the later years. Today millions of users across the world are using Baraha for creating documents in Indian languages. Baraha was a freeware from 1998 to 2010 and became a paid software from 10.0 version onwards with new features and fonts.

The biggest challenge for use of Indian languages is the keyboard. At present, usage of English language & English keyboard in computers is inevitable. One has to use the English keyboard only to type Indian language text. There are many different keyboard layouts for typing Indian languages. Many such layouts are based on the earlier typewriter designs, which are not at all relevant for a smart computer! It is also very difficult and confusing for a common user, who spends most of the time using the English keyboard, to switch to one such keyboard for quickly typing an email in say Kannada or Hindi. Baraha breaks the keyboard barrier for Indian languages by providing a phonetic keyboard in which any Indian language word may be typed using the standard English keyboard. Baraha user doesn't feel any discomfort when he switches between typing Indian language text and English. In fact, writing in Baraha is as simple and easy as writing our names in English!

Baraha breaks the script barrier between different Indian languages. Indian scripts are mostly derived from the Brahmi script, which is also the underlying concept in Baraha. Baraha uses a common code to represent all the Indian languages which makes it possible to convert text from one script to another. For example, let's say a Kannada user who understands Hindi language receives a Hindi email. If the user is not fluent in reading Devanagari script, then he can convert the email to Kannada script itself and read it.