Bhashanet Portal : Empowering Multilingual Internet

Bhashanet Portal is a government initiative to promote linguistic diversity and accessibility by providing digital resources and tools in multiple Indian languages for inclusive communication and e-governance.

Table of Contents

Context: Many Union government websites have started using a Hindi Web address.

BhashaNet Portal

BhashaNet Portal is a government initiative focused on promoting the use of Indian language domain names and email addresses, aligning with the principles of Universal Acceptance (UA) and multilingual internet access.
It aims to create a multilingual internet environment where users can easily access and interact with online content in their local languages.
It is operated by: Meity & National Internet Exchange of India (NIXI).

Bhashanet provides

Language assets like fonts, keyboards, and transliteration software.
Speech synthesis and recognition tools for Indian languages.
Machine translation tools for effortless translation between regional languages.
Datasets and research aids for developers and researchers working in natural language processing.

Bhashanet Portal plays an important role in facilitating the digital language gap, thereby guaranteeing India’s linguistic variety is represented and valued in cyberspace to suit the targets of Digital India and inclusive rule.

About Universal Acceptance (UA)

Universal Acceptance (UA) is a global movement aimed at making the Internet more accessible in languages other than English.
It advocates for:
- Internationalised Domain Names (IDNs) – Web addresses in non-English scripts.
- Internationalised email addresses – Email addresses in regional languages.
The Domain Name System (DNS) historically supported only ASCII (English-based character set).