Guwahati, Sept. 16: A member of the panel constituted by the Bureau of Indian Standards (BIS) to examine issues pertaining to allotting a separate slot to the Assamese script in the Unicode Consortium today said he was approaching agencies and individuals in Assam for their suggestions in a bid to prepare arguments in support of the matter.

Dilip Kumar Kalita, director of Anundoram Borooah Institute of Language, Art and Culture, and one of the six members of the panel, told The Telegraph that preparing a line of action on the issue was complex and time-consuming as they needed to go in details to convince the BIS. Once the BIS is convinced about the separate identity of the Assamese script, it will move the Centre which will then send a proposal to the Unicode Consortium to allot a separate slot for Assamese script.

The BIS had also requested the Assam IT department to become another member of the panel from the state but the department has remained silent on the invitation. It had intimated Anurag Goel, commissioner and secretary of the IT department, about the request by an email dated April 24.

Ashish Tiwari, member-secretary of the electronics and information technology division of the BIS, told this correspondent today that the Assam government was yet to respond to their request.

However, chief minister Tarun Gogoi had said yesterday that the state government would constitute a “broad-based committee” to study in detail the computational intricacies of the issue.

Kalita said he had approached Asam Sahitya Sabha and the computer science department of Gauhati University, besides several individuals. “We have held two rounds of meeting and are working on the issue from different angles,” he said. “We are trying to prove that the Assamese script is older than the Bengali script. We have made some progress in our two meets. The process is a time-consuming one and cannot be done in a day or two. There has not been a meeting of the panel till now. We are preparing so that we can put our points convincingly to the BIS whenever the panel meets,” he added.

The BIS formed the panel after the issue of a separate slot for Assamese script was raised by surgeon Satyakam Phukan who has been researching on the issue since the fifth meeting of the Indian Language Technologies and Products Sectional Committee LITD 20 in New Delhi in February this year. Sources said the technical matter of issuing separate code for characters could be sorted out if the Unicode Consortium could be convinced of the separate identity of the Assamese script.

“What is most important now is the state government’s will to mount pressure on the BIS and the Centre and convince them about the separate identity of Assamese script,” a source said. “If Assamese language is written by using Bengali script, then Assamese script will lose recognition on the national and international stage. Besides, Assamese characters like khya which are not found in the Bengali script will not be available in the Unicode as characters and there will be a problem in transliteration of the Assamese script,” the source added.