With the localised or desi domain .bharat now accessible in all 22 Indian languages, the Ministry of Electronics and IT (MeitY) is further endorsing the local content creation with a slay of awareness programs.

"With an initial approval of 5 languages, we have now a total of 22 languages available in .bharat domain to use," Anil Jain, chief executive of the National Internet Exchange of India (Nixi), adding that the initiative brings security element to the core since servers are hosted locally.

Nixi, a Delhi-based agency under Ravi Shankar Prasad-headed MeitY assists the exchange of domestic Internet traffic, and acts as an autonomous body for the maintenance of .in domain.
 

The .bharat is categorised under the internationalized domain name top level domain (IDN TLD).

India is the only country in the world which has IDN TLD in 15 scripts, and 22 languages, while in all other countries, there are only one or a maximum of two IDN TLDs, according to Jain.

In 2015, the US-based ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) had primarily approved a few Indic top level domain names for the use.

"We are saying that we should be proud of our own domain name whereas for domains such as .com, .net, and .org, the servers are outside India, and there is a security threat," the top official added.

The Centre has launched a scheme to promote Indianised website domain names in order to make Internet inclusive but unavailability of websites in local content proved to be a bottleneck for the initiative to take off initially.

The adoption of .bharat, however, continues to be low with nearly 5,000 domain names registered currently.

"We are now working on promoting people to create more content in local languages, and have taken a few steps in this area," he said.

Following the existing bottleneck, the Nixi, has come out with an initiative to offer .bharat to universities or educational institutions for free, and offering free email with every domain registry to promote Indian languages in email communication.

"In the coming days, we will have put more efforts in the local content creation in terms of .in and .bharat that is why we have gone full throttle on the campaign, informing people why they should adopt .in instead of .com." the official added.

The government, according to Jain, has already launched the Wikipedia and Website contests to further fuel the content procedure in 22 languages.