Domain name goes Hindi...

There is good news for SMEs! The dot-Bharat domain name in Hindi is set to be launched in India by May next year, with the aim of bridging the digital divide in the country. This will enable organizations and individuals to register their website addresses in Hindi and later in more Indian local languages like Bengali, Punjabi, Urdu, Tamil, Telugu and Gujarati. This is a great opportunity for SMEs to draw a large proportion of Indians who use content on Internet but aren’t familiar with English.

Now days even if content are in local language still user need to type the URL in English. This is a large step towards developing a multi-lingual computing environment in India i.e. already proved to be a great use in countries like Japan and South Korea.

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), which governs domain names internationally, has allowed India to register domain names in above mentioned Indian languages.

What's in it for SMEs?

Internet is a low cost medium for SMEs to reach out to new potential markets and engage their existing customer base. The advent of e-commerce has opened up a whole new set of opportunities for SMEs. Still there are few hurdles on the way. According to 2001 Census, about 11% of the India’s population understands English, while 40% are well-versed in some form of Hindi. Also there are close to 100 million Internet users in India, in which74% are literate, according to Census 2011. Clearly there is a huge opportunity for SMEs to engage customers in a language which they are more familiar with.

Although there are other aspects too to achieve complete multi-lingual computing environment in India, like operating system, language keyboards, script sets and browser in local language. Once in place, Internet in local language will available in India over the next 10-15 years. 

 

How it will affect your business?

The domain name helps users find their way around the Internet. Every computer on the Internet has a unique address, just like a telephone number, which is a rather complicated string of numbers. It is called “IP address” (IP stands for “Internet Protocol”). IP Addresses are hard to remember. Here the domain name comes for rescue and helps user to easily remember a familiar set of alphabet (i.e. “domain name”) to be used instead of the IP address. If this domain name is available in language like Hindi which is commonly understands by a large chunk of population then it will be much easier to target them. Now SMEs can innovate and offers specific product and services which are well customized as per the requirement of regional customers, and this will help them to move from common to niche approach.