ICANN recently announced the successful evaluation of four additional proposed IDN (Internationalized Domain Names) ccTLD strings for India. This was done through a fast track process that was approved by the ICANN Board in 2009. After the successful evaluation of the four new IDN strings (Malayalam, Kannada, Bengali and Oriya), the next step will be string delegation, where requests can be made for the delegation of these strings.
IDNs are very useful in increasing access to Internet, especially in a linguistically diverse country like India. With this in mind, one of the main criteria for IDN ccTLD applications is that the script used to represent the string must be non-Latin. With these new strings, there are now a total of 11 ccTLDs in various Indian languages, such as Hindi, Urdu, Telegu, Gujrati, Punjabi, etc.