The Indian government has launched the .Bharat domain name on August 27, 2014. The domain name is in devanagari script and it covers eight languages, including Hindi and Konkani.
The .Bharat domain will enable companies and individuals to book a domain name in Hindi language in Hindi script. The new chosen domain name will have .Bharat as an extension, getting away from the common and popular extensions like .com, .in, .org and .net.
Communications and IT Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad spoke for the new effort and said, “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.”
It is expected that the National Internet Exchange of India (NIXI) will have Internationalized Domain Name (IDN) for languages of India, such as Bengali, Punjabi, Telugu, Urdu, Tamil and Gujarati.
The IT minister also said that PM Modi is a supporter of information technology and added, “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),” says a report ofBusiness Standard.
The new broadband project is estimated at Rs 35,000 crore and will offer high-speed broadband connections to around 2.50 lakh gram panchayats across the country by 2017.
The minister also talked of how e-commerce is going to be the next big thing in rural India and will be responsible for generating jobs, while NOFN will be changing most things in e-commerce in days to come.