Government of India Launch Dot Bharat Domain For Regional Languages
Standing on their promise of bringing technical, infrastructural development to the forefront, the Government of India has launched Dot Bharat domain in Devanagari script. The domain will initially begin support for Hindi, Bodo, Dogri, Konkani, Maithili, Marathi, Nepali and Sindhi languages. It will be later extended to more languages in the future.
This move will make it easy for a lot of people who are not versed in Roman characters. A huge section of Indian population cannot comprehend English, and that makes it hard to introduce them to the internet. This domain will work towards introducing them to the working of the internet that they can use to avail government services. The government is also looking at making government documents available online to create more transparency. They want to create a one window system that will let villagers get the documents they need without traveling to government offices.
The domain was launched by the Minister of Telecom Ravi Shanker Prasad. It is expected to bring a good amount of convenience in the rural areas. The government is planning to make a major shift towards e-governance. It will also help bring business opportunity till now limited to urban centers to the hands of the rural population. This would certainly result in job growth in regions that need them. Dot Bharat was developed by the National Internet Exchange of India in cooperation with Centre for Development of Advanced Computing.
Dot Bharat would also help boost the creation of webpages based on local languages. It will not just help in bringing a lot of people to the internet but create a huge job growth for the technical spectrum from engineers to designers who are comfortable with local languages. Indian Prime Minister too has pressed on more use of local languages in government communication.
It will be interesting to see if the local language sites are better that the mainstream internet or will it too devolve into comment section filled with name calling and undue criticisms.
