Government sites start trying Hindi web addresses

Many Union government websites have started using a Hindi web address, following years of efforts by supporters of Universal Acceptance (UA), a movement that has advocated for having more of the Internet be available — and accessible — in languages other than English. Two key efforts under the UA umbrella have been so-called internationalised domain names (IDNs) and email addresses.

Now, the Ministry of Home Affairs mainly uses a Hindi URL, गृहमंत्रालय.सरकार.भारत, with both the Hindi and English versions of the website being available under this address — a mirror of the site under the previous English URL (mha.gov.in) remains available. The addresses swap out India’s .in country code top-level domain for an Indian language equivalent.

Historically, internationalised web and email addresses have been a challenge, as the domain name system (DNS) — and the backend processes that made browsing the web work — have been limited to ASCII, the mainly English-language set of characters that early computing relied on. Non-English languages, and even many variations of the Latin script, are not a part of ASCII’s character set.

Since the 1980s, researchers around the world have toiled away to mitigate these limitations, and by now, most web browsers and commercial email services support IDNs, albeit through a backdoor: a non-Latin URL is processed as a “Punycode” shorthand that is essentially a garbled ASCII script, but users are shown the intended address.

The struggle has been adoption. Even as large parts of the web are in Indian languages, their addresses tend to be in the Latin script. The Union government has for years tried to encourage adoption of .bharat IDNs, which include 22 regional languages aside from Hindi, such as .இந்தியா for Tamil, but private pickup has been scarce.

The Union government’s own websites have tried to lead by example, with many sites, such as the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology, the National Internet Exchange of India (NIXI, which operates the .in and Indian languages’ domain name registry), the Ministry of Minority Affairs, and dozens of others have adopted Hindi web addresses, at least for the Hindi version of their pages. The IT Ministry and NIXI maintain Bhashanet, a dedicated portal to help government organisations add an IDN.

Private adoption across other languages has been even smaller — a Google search returns less than one page of results for websites that use a .இந்தியா IDN.

The challenge, after all, could be in prying even Indian language sites and their users away from an English default. “I have spent seven good years working on the UA problem,” Ajay Data, a technology CEO who has urged firms for several years to fix systems that don’t accept IDNs, said at a recent UA event in Delhi.

“And this is my conclusion today: just raising awareness and fighting about the adoption and delivery is not the issue. “We need a benefit.” In other words, websites need a compelling case to add web addresses (and email addresses) in regional languages, now that many of the biggest browsers and email systems now support the feature.