Coming soon, .bharat in 7 Indian languages

NEW DELHI, INDIA: As the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) has given its approval to Internationalized Domain Names (IDNs), there will be a new domain name, .bharat, in seven Indian languages from early 2012.

The decision to go for generic TLDs has been taken during the previous ICANN meeting. Though the country is pushing for all the 22 constitutionally recognized languages, the corporation has initially permitted seven major languages. These languages are: Hindi, Urdu, Bengali, Telugu, Tamil, Gujarati and Punjabi.

Dr Govind, Senior Director, DIT said that it is important to emphasize that we should develop multi-lingual Internet content, which is truly local Internet. "All the stakeholders in the world should work together to make Internet global," he said.

N Ravi Shanker, Additional Secretary of DIT, said that international domain names are nothing but local usage of domain names. Shanker informed that they have started the process for .bharat in seven Indian languages and would go for other languages in the future. DIT together with C-DAC has aggressive plans while the latter has developed tools and software.

Tulika Pandey, additional director at DIT, said that the presence of local languages on Internet is dismally low. She said that tools and technology as well as resources are already available for supporting Indian languages over the Internet.

60 per cent of the Internet users are non-English today. "There was an immense need for IDNs due to geographical and cultural expansion of the Internet, global interoperability and contemplating innovation as well as creation of opportunities for business and new services," Pandey said.

ICANN allowed seven Indian languages on the basis of the population of speakers. The applications for new gTLDs will be accepted from January 12, 2012 to April 12, 2012.