The Internet and Mobile Association of India (IAMAI) held a two days event, "The India Digital Summit 2007" at New Delhi.
At the summit, Communications and Information Technology Minister, Dayanidhi Maran, said that Internet, like television or newspapers, should have more local content for better penetration and adoption by the masses.
Maran further said, "If we look at the case of television in India, the real adoption and penetration came only when the content became local. Internet being an interactive medium gives us great opportunity to find out what the customer wants."
The Communication and Information Technology Ministry said that it will soon launch internationalised domain names (IDN) in Indian languages, including Hindi, Tamil, Malayalam, and others, enabling local language domain names at the secondary level.
In addition, Maran also revealed that in order to increase Internet speeds for Indian consumers, BSNL, MTNL, and STPI are working together on hosting servers in the country, which is expected to be done within three to four months.
However, they are still trying to ensure that the cost of hosting a server in India should be cheaper than hosting it in the US. They believe that Internet traffic generated within the country remains here, thus freeing international bandwidth in the process.
Explaining further, Maran said that with growth rate of the Web site hosting market predicted at 0.62 percent, the target that he's set for India is to see that .in websites with servers based within the country take their positions in the top 10 Web hosting sites.
Reportedly, India is one of the top six Internet using nations in the world, and the high double digit annual growth ensures an increasing number of new users coming on board every year.
Maran said that his vision of "Digital India" was an India connected with a network of communication technologies spanning optics fibre and wireless, interacting in all 22 languages using server-based, language machine translation, and cross lingual information access facilities.
Apart from this, other 2007 targets include broadband coverage for all secondary and higher secondary schools, broadband coverage for all public health care centres, and for all gram panchayats. (
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This shows us that India is hitting the point where they really do want to have localized content instead of the generic news, websites, etc that the rest of the world has created. There should be a strong push in 2007 for more specialized websites, not just the typical "portal" type sites. This is great for .in name holders, the more specific, the name, the better chance you have of it becoming valuable.
Local Content on Internet is being Pushed Strongly
