BSNL, Datamail Partner to Offer Free Email Addresses in 8 Indian Languages

State-run telecom firm BSNL has partnered with Jaipur-based Datamail for providing email addresses in eight Indian languages.

Following the 'Digital India' dream of the government, BSNL has offered free e-mail address service in eight Indian languages to its broadband users by launching a 'Datamail' service. Now BSNL broadband users will be able to open an email address in Datamail service in their own language.

"Providing the linguistic email address is one of its kind initiative in the world to achieve our Prime Minister's vision of Digital India. It's now possible in every part of India to have an email address in their own language and communicate in preferred language," BSNL Managing Director Anupam Shrivastav said in a statement.

The email service will be available through mobile application. BSNL broadband customers can use Datamail app which is free to be downloaded from any Android or iOS system through their respective play store.

"The linguistic email service offered by BSNL will have DataOne.Bharat domain (in Hindi or Devanagari script) and email address will be offered in eight regional languages including Hindi, Gujarati, Urdu, Punjabi, Tamil, Telugu, Bengali and Marathi," BSNL Director for Consumer Fixed Access services N K Gupta said.

Few months back, the government had launched .Bharat (in Hindi script) domain in Indian languages to increase the reach of Internet users by providing domain names in their own language so as to cover over 70 percent of the country's population living in the rural and remote areas.

"Our fully 'Made in India' software product enabling Datamail service is a revolution in the world as many countries are waiting to inject the linguistic email address to empower the non-English speakers of the world. We are happy to contribute to the Prime Minister Narendra Modi's Digital India dream by partnering with BSNL," Ajay Data, Founder and CEO of Data XGen said.

As per Indian Telecom Services Performance Indicators Report (April-June, 2016) released by TRAI, total Internet subscribers in India are about 350.48 million which account for about 30 percent of the country's population.

Indian languages account for less than 0.1 percent content on world wide web and over 89 percent population is non-English speaking and unable to read and communicate via email as the language utilised to communicate is English, the statement said.

"The most spoken languages in India in 2016, according to our analysis based on secondary data, are approximately Hindi (544.39 million), Bengali (107.60 million), Telugu (95.4 million), Marathi (92.74 million), Tamil (78.41 million), Urdu (66.47 million), Gujarati (59.44 million), Kannada (48.96 million), Punjabi (37.55 million), Assamese (16.98 million)," the statement said.