most of the major IT Companies have declared their support for it. Unicode for Indian Languages use ISCII-88 and not ISCII-91 which is the latest official standard. It was felt necessary that Indian Government should represent UNICODE Consortium for necessary modification in the code pertaining to Indian languages script and hence Department of Information Technology became full member of Unicode Consortium with voting right.
16 Bit (2 Byte) UNICODE
Unicode standard is the Universal character encoding standard, used for representation of text for Computer Processing. Unicode standard provides the capacity to encode all of the characters used for the written languages of the world. The Unicode standards provide information about the character and their use. Unicode Standards are very useful for Computer users who deal with multilingual text, Business people, Linguists, Researchers, Scientists, Mathematicians and Technicians. Unicode uses a 16 bit encoding that provides code point for more than 65000 characters (65536). Unicode Standards assigns each character a unique numeric value and name. The Unicode standard and ISO10646 Standard provide an extension mechanism called UTF-16 that allows for encoding as many as a million. Presently Unicode Standard provide codes for 49194 characters.