Ravi Shankar Prasad unveils dot Bharat domain name

Telecommunications and IT Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad Wednesday unveiled the dot Bharat domain name, an official statement said here.

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, the minister said, adding that mobile devices and applications as well as social media will be important determinants of this growth.

The National Internet Exchange of India (NIXI) and the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC) have been working for the last two years on the dot Bharat domain name.

The dot Bharat ccTLD (country code top-level domain) is shared by other Indian languages such as Boro, Dogri, Konkani, Maithili, Marathi, Nepali and Sindhi-Devanagari and the end user can now get domain names in these languages apart from Hindi, the statement said.

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

The minister said 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 is aiming 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.