Tamil Nadu Chief Minister M Karunanidhi today asked Telecom Minister A Raja to advise the Unicode Consortium to defer considering the proposal for encoding Indian Heritage Scripts in the Unicode Standard as it has raised "considerable concerns" among the Tamil community.

"The Government of Tamil Nadu has come to know that Government of India (Department of Information Technology) has sent a communication to the Unicode Consortium, proposing to encode Indian Heritage Scripts (Vedic, Sanskrit and Grantha) in the Unicode Standard so that ancient knowledge could be represented on electronic media and in the internet."

"The proposal has raised considerable concerns from a wide cross-section of Tamil community around the world. They have indicated that sufficient consultations have not taken place with eminent Tamil scholars before submitting the proposal. In particular, considerable reservations have been expressed about inclusion of five Tamil characters into the Grantha code places," Karunanidhi said in a letter to Raja.

Responding to the concerns, Karunanidhi said, he had convened a meeting here recently in which senior state cabinet members and scholars, among others, had participated.

A unanimous view emerged at the meeting that the proposal required much wider consultations before finalising it.

"In this connection, Tamil Nadu Government would like to constitute a High Level Committee to hold wider consultations and make recommendations on the proposal", he said.

Since the proposal has gone from the Centre to the Consortium, "it may be desirable for the Communication and IT Minister to advise Unicode Consortium to defer consideration of this proposal, pending wider and in-depth consideration among various scholars and stakeholders," Karunanidhi said.

The Unicode Consortium is a non-profit organisation that coordinates the development of the Unicode standard. Its goal is to to replace existing character encoding schemes with Unicode and its standard Unicode Transformation Format (UTF).

The organisation was founded to develop and promote the use of the Unicode Standard globally.