The Indian Government will provide a free “.bharat” domain name for one year when a user buys a “.in” domain, reports CIOL. This is mainly to push for Indic language adoption and making an ecosystem for communication in Indian scripts. The report adds that the “.bharat” domain, available in both Devanagari and other scripts, is being sold only by some companies registered with National Internet Exchange of India (NIXI). English speakers low in the country Earlier last week, the Indian government said that it wanted email service providers to provide users with addresses in Indian languages, starting with Hindi. It added that ‘sufficient local language content and tools’ were needed to access it in order to increase internet penetration and push higher rural adoption. This was needed because English speakers and readers in the country were low (10.35%), according to Rajiv Bansal, Joint Secretary at the Ministry of Electronics and IT, who said this at a meeting he called with unnamed attendees. ICANN added Indic top level domains In April this year, ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) approved four additional proposed Indic top level domain names (TLDs), in Malayalam, Kannada, Assamese and Oriya languages. The TLDs were yet to be delegated to NIXI (National Internet exchange of India). While Malayalam, Kannada and Oriya will use their own scripts, Assamese TLDs will use the Bengali script. In August 2014, NIXI started taking registrations for “.bharat” domain names in Devanagari script. Although recommended for Hindi, the common script made…
