A draft policy framework and guidelines have been drawn up to prepare the ground for the full-fledged use of domain names (website addresses) in Indian languages, possibly by year-end or later.
The guidelines and policy, prepared by the Department of Information Technology in consultation with the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC), may be subject to changes before they are put in place.
Hindi is expected be the first Indian language to be made part of the new Internationalised Domain Name (IDN) system. The IDN was launched in November 2009 by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), the global body that oversees the operation of the domain name or website address system.
The IDN regime, launched after years of discussion and preparation, marked the biggest change since the core protocol governing the Internet address system came into being, making it possible for users of languages with non-Latin scripts to use them in web-addresses.
As the first step, the ICANN has been permitting the introduction of a limited number of internationalised country-code top level domain names — website addresses in different languages ending with the name of the respective countries (For instance, the part that ends with a .com, .org or .edu).
The ICANN has put in place a “fast track” system, under which certain requirements will have to be fulfilled by individual countries before making their language systems operational.
The Devanagari script-based languages (Marathi, Hindi, Konkani, Sanskrit and Nepali), Gujarati, Oriya, Punjabi, Malayalam, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Assamese and Bangla will be included in the new language dispensation in phases. It will eventually cover all 22 official languages, including those using Perso-Arabic scripts such as Urdu, Sindhi and Kashmiri.