By TIOL News Service

NEW DELHI, AUG 28, 2014: THE National Internet Exchange of India (NIXI) has announced that .IN Registry has launched the Bharat domain name (भारतwritten in Devanagari script). It was launched by Minister for Communications and Information and Law and Justice, Mr. Ravi Shankar Prasad, yesterday at a function held here.

Speaking at the function the Minister said 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, he said, while adding that Mobile devices and applications as well as social media will be important determinants of this growth.

The Minister said that 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 said Digital India project aims 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.

The government’s Rs 1.13 lakh crore initiative would also attract investment in electronics manufacturing, create millions of jobs and support trade, the minister said. The plans to digitally connect the entire country will be supported by 20- and 40-hour modules on digital literacy in regional languages, which the government plans to run over the next few years. The government is bringing the open access to "broadband highways" across cities, towns and villages would also give a fillip to trade across the country.

The Minister unveiled the portal containing a few .भारत based popular domain names by cutting the ribbon electronically through the computer mouse.

Since the same .भारत ccTLD is shared by other Indian languages such as Boro, Dogri, Konkani, Maithili, Marathi, Nepali and Sindhi-Devanagari, the end user can now get domain names in these languages apart from Hindi. The sunrise period for the same has commenced from August 15, 2014.

This is soon to be followed in the coming months by similar launches in regional languages such as Tamil, Gujarati, Punjabi, Urdu, Telugu and Bangala etc.

NIXI has been spearheading the goal of multilingual Internet and to this end NIXI has collaborated with Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (CDAC) in setting up of an expert team on Internationalized Domain Names (IDNs).This is expected to enhance the reach and relevance of Internet for remote and far flung villages, further bridging the digital divide.