NEW DELHI: India, with its existing 243 million Internet users, is all set to get a ‘dot Bharat’ domain name from this month that will help bridge the digital divide and accelerate e-governance. This will be soon followed by web addresses in six regional languages.

In tandem with its dream of ‘Digital India’ to connect with the people across the country, the new Bharatiya Janata Party-led government is expected to unveil the ‘dot Bharat’ domain name Aug 21. It will also soon launch Uniform Resource Locators (URLs) or web addresses in six regional languages.

The National Internet Exchange of India (NIXI) and the Center for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC) have been working for the last two years on the dot Bharat domain name. ”The dot Bharat initiative was taken up for our non-English speaking people. With this initiative, people can now type the URL in their own languages. This will help people in the villages and remote places. Hence it will help bridge the digital divide. This will also encourage generation of local content,” NIXI chief executive Govind, who uses only one name, told IANS.

Telecommunications and IT minister Ravi Shankar Prasad is expected to launch the dot Bharat domain name Aug 21, he added. ”After the dot Bharat domain name, in some time we will launch six regional URLs in Bengali, Telegu, Tamil, Gujarati, Punjabi and Urdu,” Govind added. The English version of dot Bharat is dot IN. He said there are at least 600,000 private dot IN domain names apart from around 1,000 government domain names. The dot Bharat domain name will also help people using scripts like Marathi, Konkani, Maithili, Dogri, Bodo, Sindhi and Nepali apart from Hindi, Govind said.

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