The Ministry of Electronics and IT (MEIT) has announced a number of initiatives to increase the adoption of internet in the country, especially among the non-English speaking population. The MEIT believes that one of the ways to increase adoption is by letting people access the internet and its content in local languages.
The MEIT has announced a number of initiatives to increase Internet adoption in India. This includes making domain names available in local languages, which are now available in 15 regional languages in India. This includes Hindi, Boro, Dogri, Sindhi, Maithili, Marathi, Konkani, Nepali in Devanagiri script and Gujarati, Manipuri, Bengali, Tamil, Telugu, Punjabi and Urdu. The remaining languages that the National Internet Exchange of India (NIXI) had applied to Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) have also passed the string evaluation criteria.
NIXI is now in process of submitting an application for delegation request for these languages to ICANN. It is also in process of preparing the required APIs to make these domain names possible. Rajiv Bansal, Joint Secretary, MEIT and CEO, NIXI said, “Government with NIXI is now running an offer whereby registrants, on first come first basis can get domain names booked from IDN accredited registrars of the registry.”
The government is in talks with email service providers like Google, Microsoft and Rediff to allow users to sign up in local languages. The MEIT believes that this would be a step forward in ensuring sufficient local language content for internet users in semi-urban and rural areas. Further, the government is also in talks with phone manufacturers to offer local language fonts in their mobiles.