BANGALORE: The government has officially and recently launched the .bharat domain name in Devanagari script covering eight languages including Hindi. With this launch, companies who are interested in owning a website with domain name in Hindi, Boro, Dogri, Konkani, Maithili, Marathi, Nepali, and Sindhi-Devanagari languages would be able to book the name in Devanagari script.

According to Mnister Ravi Shankar Prasad “This initiative should not stop at eight languages. I asked the department to make .Bharat domain name available in all the Indian languages very soon,” communications and IT. The National Internet Exchange of India (NIXI) is also all set to launch the Internationalised Domain Name in other Indian languages like Bangla, Urdu, Punjabi, Telugu, Tamil and Gujarati.

Mr Prasad said that Prime Minister Narendra Modi is a big propagator of information technology. “We will connect 60,000 villages with broadband this year, 1 lakh next year and another 1 lakh in the following year through the National Optical Fibre Network (NOFN),” Mr Prasad added. The project is worth around 35,000 crore which aims to provide high-speed broadband connectivity to 2.50 lakh gram panchayats in India by March 2017.

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 the population in rural India. Mr Prasad said, as Internet will reach villages, the people there will go online to shop for things, which in turn will lead to expansion of e-commerce and opening up of more warehouses and creation of more jobs. He added National Optical Fibre Network will herald an e-commerce revolution in India.