Taking a step ahead towards digital literacy in India, government of India has launched its new domain Dot Bharat.

Ravi Shankar Prasad, union minister of communication and IT and Law and justice has launched the Dot Bharat domain in Delhi.

Starting with languages on Devanagari script, Dot Bharat is available in Dogri, Boro, Maithili, Marathi, Nepali and Sindhi languages. Thereafter, it would be made available in Punjabi, Urdu, Telugu, Bangla, etc.

The minister also instructed NiXI to make the domain available in all regional languages as soon as possible and also to keep the language of regional portal simple with minimum use of administrative language.

In India, only 35 crore people are friendly with English (9% of the total population) and only 5 percent of content is available in regional languages over the internet and all URLs are in English. Introduction of Dot Bharat would help people in accessing websites in their regional languages.

Domain registration on Dot Bharat would be open for public from November 15, 2014.

Ajay Kumar, joint secretary, department of electronics and IT, government of India (DeitY) said, “When we are planning to make India connected what would people do with internet. Therefore, to reach out to 125 crore people of this country, we will need content and domain in regional languages. Launch of Dot Bharat will become a source of content delivery in the time to come.”

Soon content of government websites such as IRCTC, BSNL and Air India would be available in regional languages as well.