Many Indian government websites are now accessible via Hindi URLs
What's the story
Several Indian government websites have switched to a Hindi web address.
The move is a result of the Universal Acceptance (UA) movement, which calls for the internet to be more accessible in non-English languages.
The Ministry of Home Affairs now predominantly functions under a Hindi URL, गृहमंत्रालय.सरकार.भारत (gRhmNtraaly.srkaar.bhaart), providing Hindi and English versions of its website at this address.
Technical hurdles
Overcoming historical challenges
Historically, internationalized web and email addresses have been limited by the domain name system (DNS).
The backend processes that enable web browsing were initially restricted to ASCII, a character set used for English.
This created problems for non-English languages and many forms of the Latin script.
Since the 1980s, researchers have been trying to overcome this limitation, resulting in most commercial email services and web browsers supporting IDNs today.
Adoption efforts
Government websites lead the way
Despite large parts of the web being accessible in Indian languages, their addresses still remain in Latin script.
The Union government has been pushing .bharat IDNs, which cover 22 regional languages, including Hindi. However, private adoption has been limited.
Government websites like those of Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology and National Internet Exchange of India (NIXI) have led the way by adopting Hindi web addresses for their pages.
Challenges
Limited private adoption
The case of private adoption for other languages is limited, with a Google search returning less than a page of results for sites using a .இந்தியா IDN (Tamil).
Ajay Data, a tech CEO who has been pushing for IDNs' acceptance, said at an event in Delhi, "Just raising awareness and fighting about the adoption and delivery is not the issue. We need a benefit."
Data's remarks underscore that websites need strong reasons to use web addresses in regional languages.