India is creating waves in the international community lately. After joining the premier club of few countries to have a currency symbol, India is inching closer and is almost inducted into a new league with website domain names in regional languages.
A few months ago, we had reported that very soon we will have non English International Domain Names (IDN) in seven regional languages such as Hindi, Bengali, Punjabi, Urdu, Tamil, Telugu and Gujarati. Now, government officials say that the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (Icann) has given a go ahead to India’s application. The registration for the website domain is expected to begin after six months, offering new vistas of business opportunities by crossing the hurdle of the digital and local divide.
At the first go, the domain names will be tested with regards to stability and security of the IDNs, the Indian Department of Information Technology (DIT) announced. The plan is to extend the IDNs to all of the 22 languages.
If you are wondering how exactly this works, here’s how. We already have a ‘dot in’ extension for Indian websites. These websites are primarily in English. With regional languages coming into the picture, you will be able to type the name of a website in, say Hindi, on the web browser. Websites with the ‘dot in’ extension are expected to register their websites with the ‘dot bharat’ extension too.
This move is expected to start off a revolution in local language content which is pretty low as of now. The number of internet users in India stands a little over 80 million which is expected to rise to around 215 million by 2015. Only about 10% of the 1.1 billion people speak English. Though languages like Hindi and Bengali are spoken a lot the world over, when it comes to internet, they are nowhere in the picture. So, when regional content with regional domain names comes into the picture, the number of internet users is bound to increase. Trade and business in local languages also will receive an impetus.
We are sitting on a potential gold mine but things may not go the way they are planned. B.K. Syngal, who is considered as the father of internet in India, is of the opinion that the allocation of domain name needs to be made competitive in order to increase the efficiency of the system. Just as the government raked in a lot of moolah for the 3g auctions, in the same way, we can have auctions for particular domain names like cricket.bharat or film.bharat. I am hoping for a fun domain name like fullyfaaltoo.bharat that can capture the essence of hindi words but cannot be translated into English without losing their charm!
A particular roadblock for this move is that the keyboards are in English and you have to depend on software to type in regional languages. We do have software to type in Hindi, but if this takes off, we can soon hope to find keyboards in Hindi as well. What are your thoughts on this?
i am sure it is going to add confusion in remembering domain names
If the Govt can get these language keyboards introduced in all the vernacular language schools, we can have an entire generation that will be able to type in their own languages other than english.
This could fuel the revolution you are talking about.
more confusion coming our way