Google has partnered with Livehindustan.com for a user-generated content (UGC) contest to increase content in Hindi on the Web. The ‘Hai Baaton Main Dum?‘ contest, which translated into English means ‘Do words have weight?’, began on December 7, 2009.

Livehindustan.com is a recently launched Hindi news portal from HT Media. With the aim of increasing quality Hindi content, the contest asks participants to submit their views in an essay format on any of the following categories: entertainment, travel, sports, health or social, economic and political issues.

For this contest Google is making use and raising awareness of its transliteration tool and is using Google Knol to manage the entries. Each essay must be between 100 and 1000 words and must be in the Hindi language.

Submissions will be accepted until January 31, 2010. A voting period will run through the month of February where entries will be evaluated by a panel of judges based on originality of content, quality of prose and interest generated.

The top 20 essays determined by the highest scoring marks in each of the judging criteria will qualify for the second round of judging, to be conducted by Google and Hindustan Times group.

One grand prize winner will be selected for each topic category and each contestant will be entitled to win one prize. Prizes include a laptop for each category winner, a gift voucher for an online bookstore for each 9th to 12th standard student in each topic category, a six month Internet subscription for the top 10 shortlisted entries from each topic category and Google goodies for the next 50 shortlisted entries from each topic category.