Thiruvananthapuram, Aug 3 - The Kerala government has asked all its departments to develop their websites in Malayalam to help provide official information to the people, officials said Monday.

The task will be undertaken by the Kerala State IT Mission (KSITM) to popularise use of Malayalam for computing.

State IT secretary Ajay Kumar Monday said that the IT Policy for the state published in 2007 had stressed the need to create Malayalam websites for all the government departments.

'This was also discussed in great detail at the government level Language Committee and now the first step towards this direction has been taken. The development of the Malayalam websites will be spread in a phased manner,' he said.

The government has also declared Unicode approved Malayalam font as the standard Malayalam font, which will help in development of Malayalam websites in a uniform manner.