Union Ministry of Home Affairs website adopts Hindi domain name

While it is not secret that the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)-led central government has been time and again talking of making Hindi the country’s national language (amidst fierce resistance from the south), reports have emerged of Union government websites now using Hindi web addresses.

According to a report by , the uses a Hindi URL – “गृहकार्य.सरकार.भारत/en” for the English site. Even if one types ‘‘, it leads to the Hindi URL. Both appear as Google search results if you search with “”, although the Hindi site comes first. In the case of this and other Union government websites with Hindi domain names, the ‘.in’ country code is notably absent from their URLs.

As of 2019, nearly 43 percent of Indians can speak Hindi, although the reading population is comparatively smaller, says a report from The Wire.

The introduction of Hindi web addresses has only poured oil into an already burning issue of the Union government’s push to adopt a three-language formula of the National Education Policy (NEP), which is being staunchly opposed by a few Indian states, with . Tensions escalated when the Modi government threatened to stop the funding under the Samagra Shiksha Abhiyan unless the states implement NEP.

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Using international web and email addresses has been difficult in the past because the domain name system (DNS) was originally built to support only ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange), the basic character set used in early computing, mostly limited to English. This meant that many non-English languages and even some versions of the Latin alphabet couldn’t be used.

Since the 1980s, researchers around the world have worked to overcome these limits. Today, most web browsers and email services can handle Internationalised Domain Names (IDNs), though not directly. Instead, non-English web addresses are converted behind the scenes into something called “Punycode”—a scrambled version using ASCII. While the computer sees this code, users still see the proper address in their language, The Hindu reported.

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