Maharashtra gets membership of Unicode Consortium

PUNE: Maharashtra has become the second state from India to get membership of the US-based Unicode Consortium, which gives universal character set to languages for their use in computers.

"Maharashtra government has received membership of Unicode consortium, an international institute. The membership will help us in unifying the Marathi fonts and subsequently spreading the language at international level," said Maharashtra education minister Vinod Tawade in his Facebook post. Maharashtra is also expected to get voting rights in the the consortium.

The Unicode Consortium is a non-governmental organisation. West Bengal was the first state to become member of Unicode Consortium. The Marathi language experts feel that this membership will help get internationally recognised symbols and characters for Marathi script, which are currently not present in Unicode but are necessary for Marathi language. It will also help get characters for emojis that are rooted in Marathi culture.