October 7, 2013, 12:49 pm
The Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) now wants schools to shift their websites to a common domain. The central board’s deputy secretary U C Bodh (Affiliation) wrote to schools that "in order to have meaningful uniformity across the schools, the CBSE advises schools to register their domain under ’ac.in’ and ’edu.in".
The agency chosen to implement this domain registration is ERNET, which is an autonomous organization under ministry of communications and IT. Bodh wrote that ENRET "is an exclusive domain registrar for registering the domains under the .IN registry since 2005 and operates under the authority of National Internet Exchange of India. ERNET registers domain name under ac.in, edu.in for schools".
Every school has a different domain name registry, though the majority of them have registered under the ".com" domain. The CBSE itself is registered with the government’s ’nic.in’ domain.
For registering their domain every school will have to send a request letter telling the domain to be registered to ERNET India along with registration charges in the form of DD in favour of "ERNET India" payable at New Delhi. The domain will be registered for five years.
Charges for registering domain for that time period will be Rs3,371. For one year registration the charges are Rs750. Also every school will have to fill online registration form through ERNET registry web site (). While filling the online form schools will have to fill details like DD amount, date and number.
Bodh writes that "in online form user has to provide primary name server and secondary name server which will be maintaining domain of the school. The name servers can be either of ERNET or school may take DNS services from any local vendor of their area.
Though the central board has not given a deadline for this new circular’s implementation, Bodh does write that schools must "take necessary action at the earliest and get their websites developed under intimation to CBSE".
The board’s focus is on making most of the school’s information available online. It has already asked schools to develop their websites and even provided a format for uploading information.
