Bengaluru, June 16 -- Geeta Nikam, 38, speaks into her smartphone in Marathi as she makes her way through a bustling vegetable market in Hiware Bazar, a village in Maharashtra, looking for seeds for her farm. A first-time internet and mobile phone user, Nikam has never typed a word. Keyboards, especially in Indic scripts, feel alien.

In Ludhiana, a large textile manufacturer with crores of rupees in revenue spends his entire working day talking to people on his phone to get tasks done. A computer system loaded with the business softwares of the world is useless to him.

Nikam and the textile manufacturer are part of the 'non-typing majority' among India's 900 million internet users. These are primarily people from Tier II, Tier III citie...