Guwahati, Feb. 23: The Assam government is ready with a detailed formal report justifying a separate slot for Assamese script in national and international standards, including the Unicode Consortium.

The report will be submitted to the Bureau of Indian Standards (BIS) this week. Indian Language Technologies and Products, a section of the BIS, will take the final call on the issue in a meeting on March 4. The BIS's opinion will be considered as the opinion of the country.

If accepted, the BIS will ask the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) to give separate slot to Assamese script in its encoding standards like ISO 10646 and ISO 15919. Then Assamese will have a separate slot in the US-based Unicode Consortium as Unicode Standard is synchronised with ISO encoding standards. What the Assam government is now working on is to convince the BIS as the ISO had earlier said that it had no objection to giving a separate slot to Assamese language if the government of India agrees to it. A six-member committee, constituted by the BIS on November 17, 2015, has said that Assamese script should get a separate slot in ISO encoding standards or in Unicode.

After hearing the panel's suggestions, the BIS had asked the Assam government to submit a formal suggestion, following which the detailed report was prepared. The report will be submitted this week.

Shikhar Kr Sarma, head of the department of information technology in Gauhati University, was entrusted with the task of considering the views and expertise of people and organisations concerned and prepare the proposal in consultation with the stakeholders.

Subsequently, meetings were held, opinions of linguists, researchers, writers, individuals and various organisations were taken. A workshop, organised last month, discussed in detail various issues, including the set of characters and symbols required for proper representation of the Assamese script in digital/computer world.

"Now we are ready with the proposal. It will be sent to the BIS within a day or two," Sharma said.

The report, a copy of which was made available to The Telegraph, points out that the first Indian Script Code for Information Interchange (ISCII), released by the BIS in December 1991, clearly mentioned Assamese script.

"Page (iii) of the ISCII document released by the BIS says, 'The Northern scripts are Devanagari, Punjabi, Gujarati, Oriya, Bengali and Assamese while the Southern scripts are Telugu, Kannada, Malayalam and Tamil.' However, in all subsequent standards like ISO and Unicode, Assamese script has not been included," the report says.

It says Assamese, a major Indian language recognised in the Eighth Schedule, has got its own script - the Assamese script, which has its own historical evolution and should be included in all national and international standards.

The report says if Assamese script in not rectified by the government agencies concerned, its identity will gradually disappear/vanish in national and international standards. "As the future is going to be complete digital world, the identity of the Assamese script will be at stake in near future," it says.

"Assamese script is one of the oldest of Indic scripts. It is a matter of national importance to preserve this historical and cultural, linguistic heritage. It is to be mentioned that Assamese is a recognised language of India in the Eighth Schedule," the report points out.