It has been three years since the ICANN, an international organization that regulates the domain name and website address system cleared the use of a broader way to address local languages on internet. Soon you will be able to see newer domain addresses like .bharat, .bharatam, .hindostan, .India etc on the website address for the Indian sites depending up on the local language in the site. Sanskrit and Malayalam addresses can have the domain name of ‘.Bharatam’. Tamil websites can use ‘.India’ and Urdu, ‘.Hindostan’.

It will take a couple of months or a little more before the names are finalized but there no interested parties who have started registering their names on these said domain names yet. Since the domain names that are popular like .com, .org, .gov, .in etc are most preferred site names, there is a bigger challenge for the newer names. Second hitch is that they have to popularize the local language for the site to be popular too.

Department of Electronics and Information Technology, in consultation with the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC), had proposed a policy by which the Devanagari script-based languages (Marathi, Hindi, Konkani, Sanskrit and Nepali) and Gujarati, Oriya, Punjabi, Malayalam, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Assamese and Bangla would be made part of the new regime in phases. In the final phase the Perso-Arabic scripts would be included too.

(AW- Anil)