Govt launches ‘.bharat’ domain name for eight Indian languages

With an aim to bridge the digital divide and enhance the reach of Internet to remote villages, communications and IT minister Ravi Shankar Prasad on Wednesday launched domain name ‘.bharat’, covering eight languages including Hindi, Konkani and Marathi.

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 Centre for Development of Advanced Computing in setting up of an expert team on Internationalised Domain Names (IDNs).
Prasad said local languages, content and culture will increasingly become important themes for the future expansion of the Internet, adding that mobile devices and applications as well as social media will be important determinants of this growth.