Net turns truly Indian as. Bharat goes online from 2010

Despite so much of content in Hindi, the Internet is still an alien face to me. Everytime I want to read the news on Rediff in Hindi, I struggle to
type the English letters," says Tribhuvan Das, a grocery shop owner in Kanpur who spends time reading the latest news on Google, Yahoo! and other websites during noon when not many customers visit his shop. During its 40 years, including the last 15 years it grew rapidly, the Internet has been an alien to 800-900 million non-English speaking Indians. The Internet started as an English language phenomenon, but even in the later years, when technology made it possible to have content in local languages, addresses continued to be in English. "If I can enter Internet addresses using Hindi letters on the keyboard, I will not have to call my son for help every time I need to read stuff on the Net," added Das. Come February 2010, and Das, along with millions of non-English speaking Indians, will be able to type .bharat in Devnagari script while accessing popular websites including Google, Yahoo!, MSN and many others.
Indians will now be able to access Web addresses in their own languages. The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names & Numbers (ICANN), the global body which sets the standards for the Internet, decided to make addresses available in non-Latin scripts on October 27. The move was in response to requests from a number of countries, including Japan, Korea, India and China. "Countries have been articulating that language is one of the inhibiting factors to Internet's growth. Today, the Yahoo! site is available in 5-6 Indian languages. Portals like Yahoo!, Sify and Rediff are already translating content and putting it on the Net. There is a demand," pointed out N Ravi Shanker, joint secretary, department of Information Technology (DIT). Indeed, according to the Internet & Mobile Association of India (IAMAI), the local language IT market in India is expected to grow 30-60% over the next few years, and reach $100 million by 2010. The government, assisted by organisations such as the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (CDAC) and the National Internet Exchange of India (NIXI), is set to make addresses with the .bharat extension available in 15 Indian languages. CDAC, one of the pioneers in the use of Indian languages in IT through technologies like the Graphics & Intelligence-based Script Technology (GIST), is carrying out the final tests and expects to make .bharat available commercially by February. It has already put up the technical policy governing the use of Indian language URLs and will shortly put up the administrative policy, which deals with dispute resolution.