2019 – Posted in: Daily News

Bharati Script – One nation, One script

For: Preliminary
Topics covered: Bharti Script, why needed, importance

News Flash

Srinivasa Chakravathy’s team at IIT Madras has, over the last decade, developed a unified script for nine Indian languages, named the Bharati script.

Why Bharti Script needed?

The idea behind Bharati is just this; the script should be undemanding, logical and easy to learn. India has 22 languages and approximately 1,652 dialects written using 11 scripts. Bharati can replace all of them.

Bharati Script

Bharati has, in general, 17 vowels and 22 consonants.
Each alphabet in the Bharati script is constructed in three parts: the main character which forms the middle part and then there are the top and base parts.
The top part signifies the changing vowel sounds and the lower, the consonants. The script has been created by choosing the simplest characters from all Indian scripts and the Roman alphabet.

Highlights

It has also developed a method for reading documents in Bharati script using a multi-lingual optical character recognition (OCR) scheme. The team has also created a finger-spelling method that can be used to generate a sign language for hearing-impaired persons. In collaboration with TCS Mumbai, the researchers have found a way for persons with hearing disability to generate signatures using this finger-spelling technique.

The scripts that have been integrated include Devnagari, Bengali, Gurmukhi, Gujarati, Oriya, Telugu, Kannada, Malayalam and Tamil. English and Urdu have not been integrated so far.

In general, optical character recognition schemes involve first separating (or segmenting) the document into text and non-text. The text is then segmented into paragraphs, sentences words and letters. Each letter has to be recognised as a character in some recognisable format such as ASCII or Unicode. The letter has various components such as the basic consonant, consonant modifiers, vowels etc.

What was the challenge in developing such a script for Indian languages

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. In Bharati characters, these different components are segmentable by design. So Optical character recognition (OCR) works quite accurately.

Source: The Hindu

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