A public petition has been sent to the President and the Prime Minister seeking to rectify the "deletion and distortions" of the Assamese script by the Unicode Consortium, a US based organisation that standardises scripts for use in modern softwares globally.
In Unicode, Assamese script has been mentioned as Bengali though there are differences in certain letters, and the petitioners were unhappy that the central government allegedly has not done anything to rectify the error.
The petition signed by 500 people have been sent last month to President Ram Nath Kovind and Prime Minister Narendra Modi urging them to take steps to encode the Assamese script in ISO:10646 Standard, an international coding standard for scripts in electronic basis.
A copy of the petition was also submitted to Assam Chief Minister Sarbananda Sonowal.
"The Assamese people are aggrieved by the deletion and distortion of the Assamese script by the US based Unicode Consortium in the international standards when the Indian national encoding ISCII has Assamese as one of the Indian scripts," said Dr Satyakam Phukan, a surgeon by profession who has done extensive research on Assamese script.
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The Indian Standard Code for Information Interchange (ISCII) was adopted by the Bureau of Indian Standards (BIS) to have a common standard for coding Indian scripts for use in computers.
The petition asked, "Who gave Unicode Consortium the right to distort the Assamese letters "Ra" and "Waba" as Bengali letters in the ISO: 10646 Standard. Why has the Government of India not taken any action against the deletion and distortion (of Assamese script)?"
Stating that the Unicode Consortium comprises officials from the Ministry of Union Electronics & Information Technology (MEITY), it alleged that they did not do anything to undo the wrong done to the Assamese people.
At a press conference here on Tuesday, Phukan said Assam Government had proposed separate encoding for the Assamese script in 2012 to MEITY which was not accepted.
But a similar proposal was submitted in 2016 to the BIS which accepted it and forwarded to the International Organisation for Standardisation (ISO), said Phukan, one of those who have initiated the movement.
The ISO functions in close coordination with the Unicode Consortium in standardising scripts.
The ISO technical committee "summarily rejected the Assam Government's proposal without stating proper reason", said Phukan.
Litterateur and academic Dr Dayananda Pathak said, "It is being made out that the Assamese language is independent but its script is a Bengali one. It is unacceptable."
"The Assamese script is ancient with a 2000 year history. There problems of software and the ISO. That is why this issue has arisen", academician Dr Ramesh Pathak said.
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