.in

Encyclopedia

.in is the Internet country code top-level domain (ccTLD) for India.

Registry operator

The domain was originally managed by the National Centre for Software Technology (NCST) and its Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC). The Government of India 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 (NIC), ERNET, and the Ministry of Defence 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 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

As of 2005, liberalised policies for the .in domain allow unlimited second-level registrations under .in. Unlimited registrations under the previously structured existing zones are also allowed:

  • .in (available to anyone; used by companies, individuals, and organisations in India)
  • .co.in (intended for banks, registered companies, and trademarks)
  • .firm.in (intended for shops, partnerships, liaison offices, sole proprietorships)
  • .net.in (intended for Internet service providers)
  • .org.in (intended for nonprofit organisations)
  • .gen.in (intended for general/miscellaneous use)
  • .ind.in (intended for individuals)

Zones reserved for use by qualified institutions in India:

  • .ernet.in (Older, for both educational and research institutes)
  • .ac.in (Academic institutions)
  • .edu.in (Educational institutions)
  • .res.in (Indian research institutes)
  • .gov.in (Indian government)
  • .mil.in (Indian military organisations)

Before the introduction of liberalised registration policies for the .in domain, only 7000 names had been registered between 1992 and 2004. As of March 2010, 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. As of March 2016, the number has more than doubled to over 2 million domain names.

The domain .nic.in is reserved for India’s National Informatics Centre, but in practice most Indian government agencies have domains ending in .nic.in.

Restrictions on use of .in domains

As per the terms and conditions of the .in registry, domain privacy is not allowed.

Internationalised domain names and country codes

India plans to introduce internationalised domain names in the 22 local languages used in India. As of October 2016, fifteen of these internationalised domain names were accepted by ICANN:

  • .भारत (Devanagari), became available with the following zones:
Devanagari string Transliterated string
भारत .bharat
कंपनी.भारत company.bharat
विद्या.भारत vidya.bharat
सरकार.भारत sarkar.bharat
  • .இந்தியா (Tamil), available as of 2015.
  • .ভারত (Bengali), available as of 2017
  • .ਭਾਰਤ (Gurmukhī), only ਡਾਟਾਮੇਲ.ਭਾਰਤ as of August 2017
  • .ભારત (Gujarati), available as of 2017
  • .భారత్ (Telugu), available as of 2017
  • .بھارت (Urdu) only ڈاٹامیل.بھارت as of August 2017 (mainly right-to-left character order)

In 2016, an application for eight further domains were accepted. They are not yet available (as of October 2016):

  • .ಭಾರತ (Kannada)
  • .ভাৰত (Assamese)
  • بارت. (Kashmiri)
  • .ഭാരതം (Malayalam)
  • .ଭାରତ (Odia)
  • .भारतम् (Sanskrit)
  • .भारोत (Santali)
  • ڀارت. (Sindhi)