Project

About eTamil and its author

eTamil is designed and built by Esan Maruff — decades of industrial experience in Finance, Banking and Audit, and the research that abolished child labour for camel jockeys in the Middle East.

Portrait of Esan Maruff, author of eTamil

Esan Maruff

இசன் மாருப் · also published as Mohammed Maruff
PhD Scholar, Department of Computer Applications
School of Computer Information and Mathematical Sciences
B.S. Abdur Rahman Crescent Institute of Science and Technology
Vandalur, Chennai — 600048, Tamil Nadu, India

LinkedIn · GitHub · [email protected]

Esan Maruff holds a Master’s degree in Computer Science, is UGC NET qualified with 97 percentile, and boasts decades of industrial experience, coupled with 8 years of dedicated research. Currently a PhD Scholar researching eTamil at B.S. Abdur Rahman Crescent Institute of Science and Technology, Chennai, he also serves as the Chief Technology Officer for iGen Services & Solutions. Maruff brings a wealth of expertise to the table, particularly in Finance, Banking, and Audit, in addition to Information Technology and Project Management.

Maruff’s contributions extend beyond the realm of corporate endeavors. Notably, his research efforts led to the abolition of child labor for camel jockeys in the Middle East through the introduction of ‘robot-jockey’ technology. This groundbreaking achievement has garnered international recognition, with features on platforms such as BBC, RestOfWorld, The History Hour, etc.

Beyond his professional pursuits, Maruff harbors a profound passion for language and engages in social and political platforms. His multifaceted background and commitment to leveraging technology for social good make him a notable figure in both academic and industry circles.

Why eTamil exists

India’s financial system runs on rules — GST across states, income tax slabs, TDS, RBI circulars on payments and KYC, e-way bills under the Customs Act, audit trails under the Companies Act. Every one of those has to be re-expressed, by hand, in a general-purpose language before software can act on it. That work is repetitive, easy to get subtly wrong, and invisible until an assessment goes badly.

Meanwhile the people who understand those rules best — accountants, auditors, finance professionals across Tamil Nadu and beyond — are often kept out of writing them down, because the tools assume English and assume a programmer.

eTamil is an attempt at both problems at once: put the domain in the language, and put the language in Tamil.

The two commitments

Money is exact. Every number is a fixed-point decimal. There is no f64 in the arithmetic path, so 0.1 + 0.2 is exactly 0.3 and two amounts a fraction of a paisa apart are never mistaken for each other.

The libraries are written in eTamil. The standard library and the entire accounting framework are eTamil source, not Rust. If they needed a systems language, the DSL would not be sufficient for the thing it exists to do. The host provides only what a language cannot express — decimal arithmetic, text measurement, file and socket access — and everything above that is readable and editable by the people who use it.

Also published

Where the work stands

The research describes eTamil through five phases, ending in policy engagement with the MCA, RBI and GSTN. The project is mid-Phase 2 and mid-Phase 3 at once: the compiler core is close to done, most of the domain modules are written, and policy engagement has not begun.

The status page is a feature-by-feature account of what runs, what is partial, and what is not built. Anything unimplemented fails with an explicit message rather than quietly doing nothing — a silent no-op in a tax calculator is worse than an error.

Get involved

The most useful contributions right now are database transactions and multi-connection support, verifying the MySQL driver against a live server, and a money type that carries a currency.

Licence

eTamil is free software under the GNU Affero General Public License v3.0 or later (AGPL-3.0-or-later).

The AGPL rather than the GPL is deliberate. eTamil is a backend language: the normal way to use it is to run it as a network service, and under a plain GPL that would not count as distribution — a hosted fork could diverge indefinitely without anyone downstream ever seeing the changes. The AGPL closes that gap, so anyone running a modified eTamil as a service has to offer those modifications to the people using it.

Acknowledgement

The research is supervised by Dr. S. P. Valli, Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at B.S. Abdur Rahman Crescent Institute of Science and Technology, and co-author of the paper.

The accounting framework is modelled on ekmungai/eloquent-ifrs.