Govt to start booking of website names in Hindi from August 21

Government has plans to launch booking of website names in Devnagari script, which is used for writing Hindi, Marathi, Dogri and 8 other official languages, from August 21.

"Booking of domain names in Devnagari script is planned to start from August 21. The extension will be .bharat in Devnagari script like commonly used .com, .in extensions," National Internet Exchange of India CEO Govind said on the sidelines of the first Asia Pacific Regional Internet Governance Forum being held in the country.

Booking of each website name or domain name will cost Rs 350 and sub-domain will cost Rs 250 each.

For First two months, domain name booking will open for companies having trademark or copyright on names like brands, government organisations, reputed commercial firms.

After two months, the service will be opened for rest.

After launch of domain name booking in Devnagari, government expects to launch website name booking Gujarati in next 3-4 months.

"Idea is that language should be no barrier in access to Internet. We are working on to start domain name booking in 7 scripts. We will start with Devnagari then in 3-4 months we expect to start service in Gujarati followed by other languages," Govind said.

NIXI has plans to launch domain name booking in Punjabi, Bengali, Tamil, Telugu and Urdu.

"Domain name booking in all scripts will be in place within a year," Govind said.