Tarun Gogoi

Guwahati, Sept. 15: Assam chief minister Tarun Gogoi today said the state government would constitute a broad-based committee to study in detail the computational intricacies of the Assamese writing script in the Unicode standard.

The committee, which comprises linguists, IT specialists-language technologists, domain specialists, IT experts from universities, information technology and cultural affairs departments, will go into the computational intricacies of the Unicode script and certain uniqueness of the Assamese script which makes it very different and independent from the Bengali script or any other script.

Gogoi also directed the IT department, the nodal department, the cultural affairs department and the Assam Electronics Development Corp. Ltd (Amtron) to organise a workshop involving IT experts, linguists, domain specialists and representatives of literary organisations to examine the issue and to submit a proposal to the central department of electronics and information technology for an individual and separate Unicode for the Assamese script.

The Assamese script in Unicode Consortium is shown as a modified version of the Bengali script. Gogoi has asked chief secretary Jitesh Khosla to formulate a future course of action so that the Assamese script finds place in the Unicode standard.

The Asam Sahitya Sabha had also earlier decided to write to the Unicode Consortium to give a separate slot to Assamese. “The Assamese alphabets were not separately encoded by the Unicode. Following their policy of unification, the Assamese script was eclipsed into Bengali in the Unicode Standard by Unicode Consortium/Inc. The uniqueness of the Assamese script was perhaps unknown to the mainly American experts of Unicode Consortium/Inc,” said surgeon Satyakam Phukan, who has researched the origin of the Assamese script at length.

Following protests, the US-based consortium wrote to the Centre seeking its opinion on the issue. The Centre asked the Assam government for its opinion. The issue was then made complex in an apparent lack of coordination between two departments of the state government — IT and cultural affairs. While one department requested the Centre to take initiatives to rename the slot, the other department favoured slight modification of the existing name.

A section of people have demanded that the slot be renamed either as Kamrupi or AMBM (Assamese-Maithili-Bengali-Manipuri). Experts believe the Assamese script has a glorious past of 1,500 years and identifying it as Bengali script in the Unicode Consortium is a gross mistake. They believe since the Centre has not yet recognised Assamese as an independent script, the Unicode Consortium is hesitating to accept it.

“The proposed committee should be a concise/working one with domain experts and should not be limited to a bureaucratic department. It should not finalise any proposal. It should be consultative and should consult the public in general as well as the organisations concerned, activists and academics related to Assamese language and the state,” said Kishore Sharma, who has been working with the issue.

“The public and organisations should be given the opportunity to express their concerns and thoughts so that a comprehensive and complete proposal with a sound background and justification can be placed before the Centre,” he added.