IIT prof’s pan Indian script for languages

An Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) professor has designed a pan-Indian script — Bharati — to make communication easier across various Indian languages. Vanita Srivastava reports.

An Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) professor has designed a pan-Indian script — Bharati — to make communication easier across various Indian languages.

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“There were two reasons. First, most of the major Indian scripts share a common structure – vowels (a, aa …), consonants (ka, kha…), consonant-vowel combinations (ka, kaa, ki...) and so on. But, we still have a large number of scripts. Secondly, though the Indian alphabet system has a logical organisation, its design has inconsistencies and the characters are complicated. Bharati tries to address this with simple and easy characters,” says Dr V Srinivasa Chakravarthy, professor, IIT Madras. There are 22 official languages and 9 major scripts in the country.

“We have applied for a patent. The next step was a software to recognise the handwritten script on a computer,”he added.