International Forum for Information Technology in Tamil (INFITT)

The International Forum for Information Technology in Tamil (INFITT) was inaugurated on 24 July 2000. It is the official and permanent organisation for hosting Tamil internet conferences and also the representative voice of the global Tamil internet community in international information technology (IT) forums. Though Singapore was not a major player in IT developments, it was an early adopter of IT and a catalyst in its use and promotion in the 1980s. Given the government’s multilingual policy, IT initiatives in English also led to developments in Mandarin, Malay and Tamil, though on a smaller scale.

Taking advantage of the government's multilingual policy and support, Dr Tan Tin Wee, a pioneer in Internet services, technology, and its adoption in Singapore, took a personal interest in mobilising Tamil Internet enthusiasts with the strong support of Naa. Govindasamy, an IT-savvy Tamil teacher. [See Tamil Internet] Tan and Govindasamy initiated the first international Tamil Internet conference. The International Symposium for Tamil Information Processing and Resources on the Internet (TamilNet97) was held on 17-18 May 1997, at the National University of Singapore. Trending topics of the time, such as keyboard input methods, language processing issues, character set issues and Tamil on the World Wide Web were discussed at this conference.

Following this event, the Tamil Nadu Government organised the next Tamil Internet conference in 1999 in Chennai, calling it TamilNet99. This was a significant milestone in Tamil Internet history, as it laid out the specific goal of achieving an internationally accepted consensus on the standardisation of the Tamil keyboard and character coding in the Tamil script. TamilNet99 concluded with the adoption of a phonetic keyboard – Tamil 99 -- as the standardised input method for Tamil and the shortlisting of just two encoding schemes out of many for field testing. 

The third conference was scheduled to be hosted by Sri Lanka in 2000, but due to political reasons, it could not take place. At the request of the conference leadership, Singapore stepped up to host the event despite the short notice of three months. The Tamil Internet Steering Committee (TISC), formed in early 2000 with support from the Infocomm Development Authority (IDA), organised the Tamil Internet 2000 (TI2000) conference from 22-24 July 2000. Despite the short notice, TISC and IDA saw this as a great opportunity to enthuse the general public on the one hand and to position Singapore as an IT hub globally, on the other. TISC decided to expand the scope of the conference and include two additional platforms for the first time: one for the exhibition of Tamil technology products and services, and the other a business hub where entrepreneurs, as well as government representatives, could conclude local and international deals while attending the conference.  The three-platform conference drew over 35,000 visitors, 600 delegates, and 20 companies from more than a dozen countries. 

TI2000 also saw the inauguration of the International Forum for Information Technology in Tamil (INFITT) on 24 July 2000. INFITT was to be, henceforth, the official and permanent organisation for hosting Tamil internet conferences and also the representative voice of the global Tamil internet community in international IT forums. Professor M Anandakrishnan from India was selected as the founding Chair of INFITT. Singapore’s ability to conceive and deliver such a remarkable conference at such short notice so impressed the conference leaders and other key stakeholders that they decided to headquarter INFITT in Singapore and appoint Arun Mahizhnan, a Singaporean, as its first Executive Director. IDA decided to support INFITT further by facilitating the employment of Nara Andiappan as Administration Executive, the only paid employee of INFITT. The next three TI conferences were held in Malaysia, the US and India, respectively, in 2001, 2002 and 2003. TI 2004 returned to Singapore, and TISC decided to introduce a small conference format for in-depth discussion by experts, rather than the model of a mega-conference that Singapore had introduced in 2000, which was aimed at the public and business audiences. The small conference, involving approximately 100 participants, was effective and fruitful in achieving a deeper understanding of the Internet’s technical and standards requirements.

The Singapore chapter of INFITT was handed over in 2008 to S Maniam, who subsequently became Executive Director of INFITT in 2010. In 2015, INFITT organised the 14th Tamil Internet Conference, in collaboration with SIM University, on its campus from 30 May to 1 June. One of the key achievements of INFITT was to create a platform for dialogue on the many differing standards in Tamil encoding. Over the years, INFITT, through the Tamil Internet conference series, facilitated efforts to harmonise Tamil encoding and to offer technical representation, as unified as possible, to international organisations such as the Unicode Consortium, which administers the international standards related to encoding schemes for all languages. 

For more Information
International Forum for Information Technology in Tamil. Accessed 1 August 2025. https://www.infitt.org/

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The information in this article is valid as of August 2025 and correct as far as we are able to ascertain from our sources. It is not intended to be an exhaustive or complete history of the subject. If you have any feedback on this article, please submit here.