It was a surprise news that almost ended up being short of a shocker. While Unicode is being adapted increasingly world-wide, our Karnataka Government seems to be heading the other way. The state government issued a notification earlier this week for a possibility of a 'bi-lingual font' for Kannada script.

The worry is not the weird idea insisting on a requirement of bi-lingual font (since we already have multi-lingual fonts in Unicode), it is the state government's decision to stick around with the old encoding in ASCII. While the encoding format is not well supported anywhere else other than the Nudi software (which is distributed as a freeware by the state government), it is definitely not path for the future.

The good thing though is that the proposed standard is still a draft and not finalized yet. Suggestions, feedback have been invited on the draft. So, join hands in informing the government of why this would be ten steps backward. Write to:

ಶ್ರೀ ಶಂಕರ್ ಹೆಚ್ ಎಸ್
ಸೀನಿಯರ್ ಪ್ರೋಗ್ರಾಮರ್, ಇ-ಆಡಳಿತ ಇಲಾಖೆ,
ಸಿ.ಆ.ಸು. ಇಲಾಖೆ (ಆಡಳಿತ ಸುಧಾರಣೆ)
ಕೊಠಡಿ ಸಂಖ್ಯೆ: 145ಎ, ಬಹುಮಹಡಿ ಕಟ್ಟಡ,
ಡಾ|| ಅಂಬೇಡ್ಕರ್ ರಸ್ತೆ, ಬೆಂಗಳೂರು - ೫೬೦೦೦೧
ದೂರವಾಣಿ 22032547

Shri Shankar H S
Senior Programmer, e-administration department,
Department of Personal and Administrative reforms,
Room no. 145A, Multistoried building,
Dr. B R Ambedkar Road, Bengaluru - 560001
Ph: 22032547