India now sole govt. with vote in emoji, text standards body Unicode Consortium

The Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) rejoined the Unicode Consortium as a Supporting Member this year, becoming one of just two government members with a vote on the body.

The consortium and its technical body are in charge of determining the text and emojis that are standard across the internet, and have played a major role in ensuring that languages around the world, including Indian languages, are recognised by computer systems globally. The IT Ministry was previously a member from 2000 to 2019, and then for one year in 2021.

The IT Ministry has not issued any statement announcing its membership, which has been listed on the consortium’s website as the “Government of India”, with a link to MeitY’s website. The membership, which allows the Indian government a half vote in the technical committee’s decision making — and a seat at the table at its meetings, mostly held in the U.S. and online — represents an annual $20,000 commitment, or about ₹17 lakh.

The IT Ministry has been a member of the consortium as a part of the decades-old Technology Development for Indian Languages (TDIL) initiative, which sought to promote, at first, an Indian alternative to ASCII, the pre-Unicode limited character set, and later on cooperated with efforts to internationalise Indian scripts by including them in Unicode.

In 2023, The Hindu reported on how the Tamil Virtual Academy, an e-learning institute that operates autonomously under Tamil Nadu’s Information Technology and Digital Services Department, had run up over $200,000 in membership fees over more than a decade, but did not attend a single meeting, or engage meaningfully with the body beyond 2016, while proprietary non-Unicode typefaces continued to be used across the State government’s arms.

The Tamil Virtual Academy remains a member, the only other Supporting Member globally apart from the IT Ministry. Other State governments, like Maharashtra and Andhra Pradesh, have briefly held memberships, but discontinued them. The IT Ministry was not present at the latest series of meetings of the Unicode Technical Committee, held from April 22–24.