.in is the

country code top-level domain A country code top-level domain (ccTLD) is an Internet top-level domain generally used or reserved for a country, sovereign state, or dependent territory identified with a country code. All ASCII ccTLD identifiers are two letters long, and all tw ...

(ccTLD) for

India India, officially the Republic of India, is a country in South Asia. It is the List of countries and dependencies by area, seventh-largest country by area; the List of countries by population (United Nations), most populous country since ...

. It was introduced in May 1989. It is currently administered by the National Internet Exchange of India.

Registry operator

The domain was originally managed by the National Centre for Software Technology (NCST) and its

Centre for Development of Advanced Computing The Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC) is an Indian autonomous scientific society, operating under the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology. History C-DAC was created in November 1987, initially as the Centr ...

(C-DAC). The

Government of India The Government of India (ISO 15919, ISO: Bhārata Sarakāra, legally the Union Government or Union of India or the Central Government) is the national authority of the Republic of India, located in South Asia, consisting of States and union t ...

issued an executive order in 2004 to transfer responsibility for managing .in domains to the newly created INRegistry under the authority of the National Internet Exchange of India (NIXI). The

National Informatics Centre The National Informatics Centre (NIC) is an Indian government department under the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY). It provides infrastructure, IT Consultancy, IT Services including but not limited to architecture, ...

(NIC), ERNET, and the

Ministry of Defence A ministry of defence or defense (see American and British English spelling differences#-ce.2C -se, spelling differences), also known as a department of defence or defense, is the part of a government responsible for matters of defence and Mi ...

were appointed as registrars for the gov.in, res.in and ac.in, and the mil.in domains respectively. In August 2018, NIXI appointed Neustar Data Infotech (India), a

subsidiary A subsidiary, subsidiary company, or daughter company is a company (law), company completely or partially owned or controlled by another company, called the parent company or holding company, which has legal and financial control over the subsidia ...

of Neustar Inc, to be the country's new registry services provider. Neustar completed migration of existing .in domains to its registry infrastructure in March 2019. Neustar added the ability to register Indian-language domains in native script by enabling end-to-end web portal language support.

Second-level domains

, liberalised policies for the domain allow unlimited second-level registrations under . Unlimited registrations under the previously structured existing zones are also allowed: * (available to anyone; used by companies, individuals, and organisations in India) * (intended for banks, registered companies, and trademarks) * (available to anyone; used by companies, individuals, and organisations in India) * (intended for shops,

partnership A partnership is an agreement where parties agree to cooperate to advance their mutual interests. The partners in a partnership may be individuals, businesses, interest-based organizations, schools, governments or combinations. Organizations ...

s, liaison offices,

sole proprietorship A sole proprietorship, also known as a sole tradership, individual entrepreneurship or proprietorship, is a type of enterprise owned and run by only one person and in which there is no legal distinction between the owner and the business entity. ...

s) * (intended for

Internet service provider An Internet service provider (ISP) is an organization that provides a myriad of services related to accessing, using, managing, or participating in the Internet. ISPs can be organized in various forms, such as commercial, community-owned, no ...

s) * (intended for

nonprofit organisation A nonprofit organization (NPO), also known as a nonbusiness entity, nonprofit institution, not-for-profit organization, or simply a nonprofit, is a non-governmental (private) legal entity organized and operated for a collective, public, or so ...

s) * (intended for general/miscellaneous use) * (intended for individuals) Zones reserved for use by qualified institutions in India: * (Older, for both educational and research institutes) * (Academic institutions) * (Educational institutions) * (Indian research institutes) * (

Indian government The Government of India (ISO: Bhārata Sarakāra, legally the Union Government or Union of India or the Central Government) is the national authority of the Republic of India, located in South Asia, consisting of 36 states and union territor ...

and

State governments State most commonly refers to: * State (polity), a centralized political organization that regulates law and society within a territory **Sovereign state, a sovereign polity in international law, commonly referred to as a country **Nation state, a ...

) * (Indian military organisations) The domain is reserved for India's

, but in practice most Indian government agencies have domains ending in . The .in registry launched following sub-domains on Oct 29, 2021 to benefit the growing market: * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * Before the introduction of liberalised registration policies for the domain, only 7000 names had been registered between 1992 and 2004. , the number had increased to over 610,000 domain names with 60% of registrations coming from India and the rest from overseas. By October 2011, the number had surpassed 1 million domain names. , the number has more than doubled to over 2 million domain names.

Restrictions on use of .in domains

As per the terms and conditions of the registry, domain privacy is not allowed. Recently updated EKYC guidelines were issued to all registrars to authenticate new registrants. Hence, the previous rule relating to bulk booking of .in domain names has been withdrawn. Now customers can book unlimited .in domain names as previously in line with promoting .in TLD on par with other popular TLDs like .com and others which also has no restrictions relating to bulk booking.

Internationalised domain names and country codes

India plans to introduce internationalised domain names in the 22 local languages used in the country. , fifteen of these internationalised domain names were accepted by

ICANN The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN ) is a global multistakeholder group and nonprofit organization headquartered in the United States responsible for coordinating the maintenance and procedures of several dat ...

: * (

Devanagari Devanagari ( ; in script: , , ) is an Indic script used in the Indian subcontinent. It is a left-to-right abugida (a type of segmental Writing systems#Segmental systems: alphabets, writing system), based on the ancient ''Brāhmī script, Brā ...

), became available with the following zones: : * ( Bengali), available * ( Gurmukhī), only ਡਾਟਾਮੇਲ.ਭਾਰਤ * ( Gujarati), available * (

Tamil Tamil may refer to: People, culture and language * Tamils, an ethno-linguistic group native to India, Sri Lanka, and some other parts of Asia **Sri Lankan Tamils, Tamil people native to Sri Lanka ** Myanmar or Burmese Tamils, Tamil people of Ind ...

), available * ( Telugu), available * (

Urdu Urdu (; , , ) is an Indo-Aryan languages, Indo-Aryan language spoken chiefly in South Asia. It is the Languages of Pakistan, national language and ''lingua franca'' of Pakistan. In India, it is an Eighth Schedule to the Constitution of Indi ...

) only ڈاٹامیل.بھارت (mainly right-to-left character order) In 2016, an application for eight further domains was accepted. While the Indian government also applied for .বাংলা ( Bengali), it was given to a competing applicant, the Bangladesh Telecommunication Company Limited (BTCL).These domains were not available (): But, they were later on made available and now are open for domain registration in India. * (

Kannada Kannada () is a Dravidian language spoken predominantly in the state of Karnataka in southwestern India, and spoken by a minority of the population in all neighbouring states. It has 44 million native speakers, and is additionally a ...

) * ( Assamese) * ( Kashmiri) * (

Malayalam Malayalam (; , ) is a Dravidian languages, Dravidian language spoken in the Indian state of Kerala and the union territories of Lakshadweep and Puducherry (union territory), Puducherry (Mahé district) by the Malayali people. It is one of ...

) * ( Odia) * (

Sanskrit Sanskrit (; stem form ; nominal singular , ,) is a classical language belonging to the Indo-Aryan languages, Indo-Aryan branch of the Indo-European languages. It arose in northwest South Asia after its predecessor languages had Trans-cultural ...

) * ( Santali) * ( Sindhi)

References

External links and references