The indian government on Wednesday launched the .bharat domain name in devanagari script covering eight languages including Hindi, Konkani and Marathi. With the launch, individuals of companies who are interested in owning a website with domain name in Hindi language would be able to book the name in Hindi script. The name would have ‘.bharat’ in Hindi script as its extension instead of commonly top level domains such as .com, .net or .in.
Users can also secure domain names in Boro, Dogri, Maithili, Nepali and Sindhi-Devanagari. The availability of domain names in Hindi and other languages can be verified from Thursday.
The National Internet Exchange of India (NIXI) manages the .IN Registry, a nodal body mandated with the registration and operation of dot In domain names. In the next few months, NIXI also plans to launch domain name in other Indian languages such as in Tamil, Gujarati, Punjabi and Urdu.
NIXI has been spearheading the goal of multilingual Internet and to achieve this it has collaborated with Center for Development of Advanced Computing in setting up of an expert team on Internationalized Domain Names (IDNs).
“This initiative should not stop at eight languages. I asked the department to make .Bharat domain name available in all the Indian languages very soon,” Communications and IT Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad said.
Mr Prasad said that Prime Minister Narendra Modi is a big propagator of information technology. “We will connect 60,000 villages with broadband this year, 1 lakh next year and another 1 lakh in the following year through the National Optical Fibre Network (NOFN),” Mr Prasad added. The project is worth around Rs 35,000 crore which aims to provide high-speed broadband connectivity to 2.50 lakh gram panchayats in India by March 2017.