The government is working on developing internet domain names in seven regional languages which would see the present country code '.in' being replaced with '.bharat'.

"We are hoping that internet domain name in seven regional languages will be implemented next year," Ministry of Communications and Information Technology, Department of IT, Senior Director Govind told reporters here today on the sidelines of a national workshop on Internationalised Domain Names (IDN).

The government has sought the approval of the US-based ICAAN, a body for assigning web addresses, for using domain names in regional languages, including Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Punjabi, Bangla, Urdu and Gujarati, he said.

"We have submitted our proposals with ICAAN for using top-level country code domain names in seven regional languages and hope we will be able to get approval by the end of this year," he said adding," thereafter we will have domain names in all 22 languages."

Once the approval is given for using domain names in regional languages, internet users across the country will be able to access internet in these languages which is at present limited to Latin characters.

Domain names are basically entered in address bar of browser to access a particular website.

"Moreover, it will also allow replacing '.in' (top-level country code domain name allotted to India) with '.bharat' in regional languages," he said.

Over the past three years, the Centre for Advanced Computing (C- DAC) Pune in close association with the Department of IT and C-DAC Kolkata, Thiruvananthapuram has been working on this project with the support of ICAAN as part of the Centre's initiative to proliferate internet use in the country.

At present, the country has a total internet users base of 80 million, including 8.1 million broadband connections, he said while asserting that the use of internet would spread in the country with the use of domain names in Indian languages.

Given the complexity of Indian writing systems, safeguards would be of primary importance to ensure that the common man is secured from pharming and spoofing attacks, he said, adding that work is also on to remove several challenges, including standardization of characters (of regional languages, typing of characters.

"The main aim of these workshops is to provide a platform to all major players in this initiative to be aware of problems and perspectives of IDN and to provide useful feedback for finalizing the policy which will then be implemented," he said.