- Researches of IIT Madras has developed a unified script for nine Indian languages, named the Bharati script. While developing the Bharati, they took cue from European languages, several of which have the same (Roman letter–based) script
- Srinivasa Chakravathy and his team has developed the unified script.
- The scripts that have been integrated in the unified script are Devnagari, Bengali, Gurmukhi, Gujarati, Oriya, Telugu, Kannada, Malayalam and Tamil. English and Urdu have not been integrated so far.
- The team has also developed a method for reading documents in Bharati script using a multi-lingual optical character recognition (OCR) scheme.
- As per the researchers, the scripts of Indian languages pose a pr oblem for such a character recognition because the vowel and consonant-modifier components are attached to the main consonant part. This difficulty is removed in the Bharati script which can be easily read.
- The Bharati characters are made up of three tiers stacked vertically. The consonant at the root of the letter is placed in the centre and the modifiers are in the top and bottom tiers.
