Central Government Rajbhasha Rules: C-DAC GIST, BIS IS 16350 & Official Language Policy

Under Article 343(1) of the Indian Constitution, the official language of the Union of India is Hindi in Devanagari script, with the international form of Indian numerals. To implement this constitutional mandate, Parliament enacted the Official Languages Act of 1963 and promulgated the Official Language Rules of 1976.

For administrative purposes, the 1976 Rules categorize the states and union territories of India into three linguistic zones:

Region 'A' (क क्षेत्र): Bihar, Haryana, Himachal Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, Uttarakhand, Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh, and the National Capital Territory of Delhi. In Region A, 100% of official communications between central offices and citizens or state governments should ideally be in Hindi.

Region 'B' (ख क्षेत्र): Gujarat, Maharashtra, Punjab, and the UTs of Chandigarh, Daman & Diu, and Dadra & Nagar Haveli. Communications are targeted at a minimum 90% bilingual or Hindi quota.

Region 'C' (ग क्षेत्र): All remaining states (Southern and North-Eastern states). Communications are generally in English, but letters received in Hindi must be replied to in Hindi.

Compliance with these regional quotas is audited annually by the Committee of Parliament on Official Language during inspections of central ministries, public sector undertakings, and nationalized banks.

Section 3(3) of the Official Languages Act 1963 is absolute and non-negotiable. It mandates that both Hindi and English must be used simultaneously for the following 14 statutory classes of government documents:

Officers who sign or issue any of these 14 document categories in English only are personally liable for non-compliance with parliamentary directives.

In the 1980s, the Graphics and Intelligence-Based Script Technology (GIST) division of C-DAC revolutionized vernacular information technology. They designed the ISCII standard (Indian Script Code for Information Interchange), which served as the foundation for the international Unicode Devanagari code allocation.

To guarantee universal vernacular access, the Bureau of Indian Standards enacted IS 16350:2016. This national standard legally mandates that all mobile phones, tablets, and kiosks sold in India must include built-in Indian language virtual keyboards and text rendering engines.

Because of IS 16350, today over 800 million smartphone users across India can read and compose messages in Devanagari without downloading third-party font packages.

The Guidelines for Indian Government Websites (GIGW 3.0), published by the National Informatics Centre (NIC) and MeitY, mandate that every government portal must offer equal bilingual accessibility:

• •1. Unicode UTF-8 Mandate: All vernacular web pages must use UTF-8 encoding. Proprietary legacy fonts (Kruti Dev, Devlys) are strictly prohibited.
• •2. Synchronous Bilingual Updates: English and Hindi versions of portals must be updated simultaneously to prevent information disparity.
• •3. Assistive Screen Reader Compatibility: Devanagari text must be structured using semantic HTML5 tags (h1, h2, lang='hi') to allow visually impaired citizens to use Hindi screen readers.