The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (Icann) has allowed India to register website addresses in seven regional languages -- Hindi, Gujarati, Urdu, Punjabi, Bengali and Telegu. But you won't be able to see these website addresses before six months as complications relating to handling the scripts are taking time to be solved. To start off, the National Internet Exchange of India (NIXI) is giving out website addresses in Devnagari script which includes languages like Hindi, Marathi, and Nepali.
Once the Indian-language domain names start rolling out, Net users can register their website addresses in Indian scripts like 'dot bharat', which at present for India is in English called 'dot in'. Icann is an international non-profit body that oversees allocation of domain names globally.
"Indian scripts aren't as easy as the English language. For example, the word Hindi can be written in three different ways even in the Devnagari script. We are deciding whether all spellings of a word can be included through a single registration or not. Plus, Marathi, Hindi, Konkani, Sanskrit and Nepali have the same script and there are issues with spellings.
And how they should be handled by the registrars of internet address. All this will take another six months to solve," NIXI's COO Govind told ET. "There are also challenges relating to use of keyboards and fonts in regional languages and above all the computer being used needs to be compatible," he added.
"Right now, NIXI is conducting tests to make sure the scripts work perfectly meaning that anyone who types the web addresses in Hindi or any other language is actually able to reach the intended website seamlessly ," N Ravishankar, joint secretary at the department of information technology told ET. NIXI facilitates exchange of local internet traffic between ISPs enabling efficient use of international bandwidth.
