Indian Gov. launches .bharat domain name

India on Wednesday launched a Web domain—with the suffix .bharat, after the Hindi name for the country—that will allow users to type Internet addresses in the Devanagari script that is used to write Hindi, Marathi, Sindhi and some other Indian languages. The National Internet Exchange of India (NIXI) and the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC) have been working for the last two years on the dot Bharat domain name.

The National Internet Exchange of India (NIXI) will soon also launch the Internationalised Domain Name (IDN) in other Indian languages like Bangla, Urdu, Punjabi, Telugu, Tamil and Gujarati. While NIXI is takes care of the domain names in India, globally Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) manages the Internet domain names and Internet protocol numbers.

Ravi Shankar Prasad, Telecommunications and IT Minister of India said e-commerce is going to bring in revolutionary changes in the economic activities of rural India. It will not only generate new jobs but also create large number of business opportunities for all sections of populations in rural India.

He also said Digital India project is aiming to offer a one-stop shop for government services and would use the mobile phone as the backbone of its delivery mechanism. Digital India promises to transform India into a connected knowledge economy offering world-class services at the click of a mouse and will be implemented in a phased manner.

Most of the future expansion of the internet is going to come from Asia, Africa and the developing world. Local languages, content and culture will increasingly become important themes for the future expansion of the internet, the minister said, adding that mobile devices and applications as well as social media will be important determinants of this growth.

"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)," he 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.