Telecom Minister To Inaugurate Dot Bharat Domain Name

Union Minister of Communications and IT Ravi Shankar Prasad will inaugurate the dot Bharat domain name on August 21 in New Delhi, which would facilitate multi-lingual Internet access.

National Internet Exchange of India (NIXI) and the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC) will enable dot Bharat ccTLD that can be registered in Devnagari script.

C-DAC is also working together with NIXI and they have set up a committee on International Domain Names (IDNs) to introduce domain names in Indian languages.

Internationalised Domain Name in Indian languages will be represented in the characters of the language concerned. Such domain names could contain letters or characters from non-ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) scripts. ASCII is a character-encoding scheme based on the ordering of the English alphabet.

In India, the IN Registry has been mandated for registering, operating and managing IDN in the Indian languages.

The number of Internet subscribers was 238.71 million in December 2013. Himachal Pradesh, with 2.04 million users, had the lowest number of Internet users, Telecom and IT Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad recently informed the Lok Sabha.