Relevance of Unicode to e-Governance

When Dr Santosh Babu (IAS), Managing Director of ELCOT invited me to present in this year CETIT Conference, I had not known much about the event. Then searching on the Internet, I learned that “CETIT 2010 is the second year of the conference-cum-exhibition on e-Governance organized by FICCI in association with ELCOT. CeTIT claims to provide an opportunity to take stock of the practice and the promise of digital technologies on e-Governance”. This certainly sounded interesting, so here I am.

This year program happened yesterday and today in Chennai Trade Centre. I presented on the topic of “Relevance of Unicode to e-Governance” (Download the deck), this was part of the session on “Back Office” Chaired by Prof M.Anandakrishnan (Chairman, IIT Kanpur).

In my brief talk (~10 Mins) I was keen that I didn’t confuse the audience with too much engineering detail on Encoding. At the same time I wanted to demystify Unicode and what it is, the importance of a single uniform encoding, where we are in terms of acceptance of Unicode by various State Governments & Govt. of India. That I think I achieved.

You can see a few slides from the presentation I delivered:

My earlier presentation on UNICODE for Tamil can be seen here.