The Minister of Communications and IT, Ravi Shankar Prasad, is set to inaugurate the dot Bharat domain name on August 21, 2014, to facilitate multi-lingual Internet access. National Internet Exchange of India (NIXI) and the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC) will enable dot Bharat ccTLD, which can be registered in Devnagari scripts such as Nepali, Marathi, Konkani, Bodo and Maithili.

C-DAC is also working with NIXI to  to introduce domain names in local languages such as Bengali, Punjabi, Gujarati, Tamil and Urdu. To this end, two agencies have set up a committee on International Domain Names (IDNs)Such domain names could contain letters or characters from non-American Standard Code for Information Interchange (ASCII) scripts. ASCII is a character-encoding scheme based on the ordering of the English alphabet.

The domain name in the Indian languages is expected to increase Internet penetration and eventually accelerate local content delivery and related services in the country’s rural and remote areas.