With so many domains already running for years now, it seems amazing India was left behind. Well, no longer. Our former colony has imperially decided that this former colony with a rapidly growing 22 million Internet users now deserves its own domain. The .in domain is now coming to the Internet.The surrounding hype suggests that India has a "potential role" of leadership in this area. ICANN also notes that India's qualifications for a domain include "rule of law, a tremendous skill set, and strong commercial base."
Update (9/14): This story struck me as strange so I did some more research. ICANN's country code delegation seems fairly liberal, and India has actually had such a domain (.in) since 1989. The problem seems to be that there aren't enough registries because there are laws restricting its user base. To clarify, ICANN is taking the much more reasonable stand of hoping for wider use of .in.