NEW DELHI: Fancy an email ID in your mother tongue? If the Indian government has its way, American tech giants Google, Microsoft and homegrown providers like Rediff could soon be signing you up for email addresses in the desi language of your choice.
At a meeting convened last month, the government asked email service providers to enable users to sign up for addresses in local languages, starting with Hindi.This is in line with the broader agenda of ensuring that when the Internet reaches deeper into the semi-urban and rural areas, sufficient local-language content and the tools to access this should be available.
“The Bharat Net project will connect 250,000 gram panchayats through high-speed Internet in the next few years, and people should be able to utilise it when it reaches them,” said Rajiv Bansal, joint secretary in the ministry of electronics and IT. Bansal,who called the meeting, said an email address is required to access the most basic Internet services. “How many people in India can actually type in or read English?” Bansal said. Executives of Google, Microsoft and Rediff attended the meeting and are of the view that the technology allows for email addresses in scripts such as Devanagri.
However, they feel government should not enforce this through diktat and instead take the lead for industry to follow suit. “What is stopping our Prime Minister Narendra Modi and other officers in government from sending out emails to the public from a Hindi email address?” said Venki Nishtala, chief technology officer of Rediff.
While Microsoft says the latest versions of its software support so-called internationalised email addresses, Gmail started recognising IDs that contain accented or non-Latin characters such as in Chinese or Devanagri in 2014. The company had posted a blog saying that Gmail users can send emails to and receive them from people who have these characters in their addresses.
“In the future, we want to make it possible for you to use them to create Gmail accounts,” Google’s Chaparro Monferrer had posted. There has been no update on this since. Google didn’t respond to emails on the matter. Microsoft is committed to developing solutions that help create economic opportunities and build IT skills by facilitating the use of local languages, a spokesperson said.”The current versions of Internet Explorer 11, Microsoft Edge and MS Outlook 2016 all support Indian language including in Hindi (eg. domain names such as and internationalised email addresses such as ),” the person said in an email.
Rediff CEO Ajit Balakrishnan said the company can implement such email addresses easily. “Email addresses in local languages is one of those nice things to have, but the government should first bring down the cost of access to around Rs 50 for the Internet to truly reach the masses,” he said. Consumption of local-language content on the internet is rising, which is a good sign for the industry. “Around seven to eight years ago, we had to shut down our Tamil site, but now the Hindi site is showing some signs of life. So we need affordable access as well as lots of local-language content,” he said.
Another executive said the government should lead by example and start facilitating addresses in Hindi through the servers of the National Informatics Centre, which handles the government’s email database and hosts its sites. The government has approached email service providers with this idea in the past, said Dr Govind, formerly with the department of electronics and IT.
source: economictimes