Membership in the Unicode consortium, which allows the Indian government half of the vote in the decision -making of the Technical Commission – and the seat at the table at his meetings, mostly held in the US and online. Photo: x/@unicode
This year, the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology joined the Unicode consortium as a support member and became one of two government members with a vote on the body.
The consortium and its technical body are in charge of determining text and emodi that are standard throughout the Internet, and played a major role in ensuring that languages around the world, including Indian languages, are recognized worldwide by computer systems. The IT Ministry was formerly a member from 2000 to 2019 and then for one year in 2021.
The IT Ministry has not issued any statement announced by its membership, which was listed on the consortium website as the “Indian government”, with a link to the Meity website. Membership, which allows the Indian government half of the vote in the decision -making of the Technical Commission – and the seat at the table at his meetings, mostly in the US and online – represents an annual commitment of $ 20,000 or about $ 17.
The IT Ministry is a member of the consortium within the ten -year initiative for Indian languages (TDIL), which first sought to promote the Indian alternative to ASCII, and later cooperated with the efforts of internationalization of Indian scripts into unambiguous units.
In 2023, Hindu reported on how the Tamil Virtual Academy, an e-learning institute, which operates autonomously under the Tamil Nadua Department of Information Technology and Digital Services, ran over $ 200,000 in membership fees for more than decades, but meaningfully participated in a single body over 2016.
The Tamil Virtual Academy remains a member, the only other supportive member around the world, unlike the IT Ministry. Other state governments, such as Maharashtra and Andhra Pradesh, briefly recorded membership, but interrupted them. The Ministry of IT was not present at the latest series of meetings of the Unicode Technical Commission, which took place from 22 – 24 April.
Published – 3 July 2025 01:15
