Last month we published news that Indian govt. is about to release Hindi domain names on or around India's Independence day this year. Finally the launch Hindi domain names has got official words and in order to facilitate multi-lingual Internet access all around the country, Ravi Shankar Prasad, who is the Minister of Communications and IT Minister, is all set to launch the dot Bharat domain in New Delhi on 21st August, 2014.
The Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC) and National Internet Exchange of India (NIXI), which is an autonomous body, will reportedly enable the dot Bharat ccTLD.
Interestingly, the dot Bharat domain can be registered in Devnagari scripts such as Maithili, Nepali, Bodo, Marathi and Konkani.
The International Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers has already cosigned the Internationalized Domain Name (IDN) to National Internet Exchange of India in seven Indian languages.
NIXI and C-DAC are working very hard together and have also jointly formed a committee on International Domain Names (IDNs) in order to introduce domains in local languages such as Urdu, Bengali, Tamil, Punjabi, and Gujrati.
The International Domain Names which will be introduced in Indian Languages are most likely to be represented in local language characters. These domain names can also carry characters or letters from Non-American Standard Code for Information Interchange scripts.
American Standard Code for Information Interchange or ASCII is a character encoding scheme which is based on the ordering of the English Alphabet.
The INRegistry has been made compulsory in the country for the process of registration, operation and management of International Domain Name in Indian languages.
In December 2013, the number of Internet subscribers in the country stood at 238.71 million, out of which Himachal Pradesh had the lowest number of Internet users with just 2.04 million subscribers. These facts and figures were recently given out by the Minister of Communication and IT Minister while informing the Lok Sabha.
The Government hopes that the domain names in the Indian languages will increase Internet penetration in the most remote areas of the country where the literacy rate is low. It further hopes that this would also accelerate local content delivery and other related services in these rural and remote areas of the country.
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