Central govt IT system to start supporting email in Hindi in 2 years

All IT systems in the central government will start supporting email communications in hindi scripts in the next two years, a senior official said on Monday.

While speaking at the Universal Acceptance (UA) Day curtain raiser event, Ministry of Electronics and IT Additional Secretary Bhuvnesh Kumar said that the work has started to make 15 ministry's website UA-compliant and content on them is being made available in hindi.

"Resolver to facilitate e-mail communications in local language script will be done over a period of 2 years. Initially it will support Hindi script and later other languages will be added," Kumar said.

He said that the Centre is encouraging the state governments to provide content in the local languages.

Global internet body ICANN has been supporting Universal Acceptance that aims to address issues around language barriers that check people from connecting to the internet.

The internet has been dominated by the English language which prevents several non-English speaking individuals from using it.

The concept of UA is to develop technology to facilitate communications in native scripts on the internet like Bengali, Devanagari, Gujarati, Gurmukhi, Kannada, Malayalam, Oriya, Tamil and Telugu.

ICANN, VP, Stakeholder Engagement, and Managing Director for Asia Pacific Jia-Rong Low said at the event that big technology companies like Google, Microsoft have come on board to support UA and there is a need for local companies to adopt it as they are closer to the users.

State-owned National Internet Exchange of India (NIXI) CEO A K Jain said that people can now book domain name in all Indian language scripts and the Centre has started to adopt them.