Minister of Communications and IT Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad will be unveiling the dot Bharat domain name on August 21 in New Delhi to facilitate multi-lingual Internet access, NIXI chief executive Dr Govind told ET.

The autonomous body National Internet Exchange of India (NIXI) and the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC) will be enabling dot Bharat ccTLD that can be registered in Devnagari scripts such as Nepali, Marathi, Konkani, Bodo and Maithili.

The International Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers ( ICANN) has consigned the Internationalized Domain Name (IDN) in seven Indian languages to the 

NIXI.

C-DAC is also closely working with NIXI and they have jointly constituted a committee on International Domain Names (IDNs) to introduce domain names in local languages such as Bengali, Punjabi, Gujrati, Tamil and Urdu sometime soon, the body said.

Internationalized Domain Name in Indian language will be represented in local language characters. Such domain names could contain letters or characters from non-ASCII scripts.ASCII or American Standard Code for Information Interchange is a character-encoding scheme based on the ordering of the English alphabet.

In India, the INRegistry has been mandated for registering, operating and managing IDN in the Indian languages.

The number of Internet subscribers stood at 238.71 million in December 2013, while Himachal Pradesh with 2.04 million, had the lowest number of Internet users, telecom and IT minister Ravi Shankar Prasad recently informed Lok Sabha.

The domain name in the Indian languages is expected to boost Internet penetration and eventually accelerate local content delivery and related services in 

India's rural and remote areas.