A few individuals fighting for a separate slot for the Assamese script in the US-based Unicode Consortium appealed to Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Tuesday to take concrete steps to encode it in the ISO (International Organisation for Standardisation) 10646 standard.

The individuals, led by city-based surgeon Satyakam Phukan, told reporters here that Unicode Consortium had deleted the Assamese script from ISO 10646 despite the fact that the national encoding system, Indian Script Code for Information Interchange (ISCII), has Assamese as one of its scripts. They also asked the Centre under what provision of the Constitution it had accepted the deletion.

If the Assamese script gets a separate slot in ISO 10646, it will ensure a separate slot for it in Unicode as Unicode Standard is synchronised with ISO encoding standards.

Phukan said the Unicode Consortium has distorted the Assamese letters ra and waba as Bengali letters in the ISO standard. “We want to ask the Centre why it has not taken any action against the deletion and distortion of the Assamese script in ISO 10646 standard as done by the Cambodian government for distortion of the Khmer script,” said Phukan.

He said if duplication has been accepted by the Unicode Consortium and the ISO in case of the three European scripts, Latin, Greek and Cyrillic, and two Indian scripts of Bengali and Maithili (Tirhuta), why cannot the same principle be applied for encoding of the Assamese script in ISO 10646 standard.

The Assam government had submitted the proposal for separate encoding for the Assamese script first in 2012 to the ministry of electronics and information technology, which was not accepted. In 2016, a similar proposal was submitted to the Bureau of Indian Standards (BIS), which was accepted. The BIS then forwarded the proposal to ISO.

Phukan said the technical committee of ISO (ISO/IEC JTC1/SC2/WG2), dominated by people associated with the Unicode Consortium, did not accept the proposal.

The individuals requested Modi to take initiative so the Centre approaches ISO to convince it of the necessity and justification for encoding of Assamese script in ISO 10646 and lobby with the member states of ISO to convince them to vote in a positive manner during balloting on the issue. They demanded that the Centre inquire into the events and actions which led to the deletion and distortion of the Assamese script in the ISO standard. Last month, Phukan and others had submitted a memorandum, signed by 500 people from the state, to Modi and President Ram Nath Kovind on the issue of Assamese script.