ICANN opened its 31st International public meeting in New Delhi yesterday with a speech from Shri Jainder Singh Secretary, Department of Information Technology, the Government of India. During the welcoming ceremony Singh made comments about the work ICANN is conducting including its Strategic Plan. "We would also like to endorse ICANN's strategic plan for the next three years. We wish ICANN all success in rolling out this plan," Secretary Singh said. "Introduction of IDNs and DNS security issues are of great importance to us. We also welcome ICANN's initiatives to promote adoption of IPv6. We eagerly look forward to an active engagement with ICANN on all these issues."

Having highlighted India’s new emergence as an IT power he mentioned the governments campaign to bring millions more Indians online, this to be done via 100,000 common service centres in the most rural parts of India. The importance of ICANN’s efforts on Internationalised domains in such a diverse nation with 22 official languages using 11 scripts "The Internet has changed the world in the last decade. ICANN has played a key role in the development of the Internet by involving all the stakeholders in establishing various technical standards and delivering a safe, secure, and trustworthy domain name system and IP address system," Secretary Singh said. "ICANN has, in recent years, made significant progress in the performance of core operational activities. This meeting is important to achieve further improvements in such functions."

The Secretary said ICANN is an "interesting public/private experiment" and the world is looking carefully at how this organization performs. "Principles such as inclusiveness, transparency, openness, and diversity will show the world to look upon ICANN as a positive influence for the technical coordination of the Internet," the Secretary added.