Who is the man behind India’s GIST multilingual technology?

The man behind GIST (Graphics and Intelligence-based Script Technology) is Dr. Raghunath Anant Mashelkar, one of India’s most respected scientists and innovators. However, the core development of the GIST system was led by Dr. Vijay Bhatkar, the creator of India’s PARAM supercomputer and a pioneer in Indian language computing.

GIST was developed in the 1980s by the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC) to make computers accessible in Indian languages. Before GIST, computers could only handle English characters. Dr. Bhatkar and his team created technology that could process and display Indian scripts - Hindi, Marathi, Tamil, Bengali, and more—thus revolutionizing digital communication in India.

This innovation helped bring multilingual computing into governance, education, and media, allowing ordinary users to type, read, and store information in their native languages. It laid the foundation for today’s language input systems, Unicode standards, and translation tools. GIST was a turning point in India’s digital history making technology inclusive and bridging the language divide for millions of Indian users.