TN Panel to submit Plan Document in Sep: Naganathan

Chennai, July 21 (UNI) The Tamil Nadu Planning Commission will submit its XI Five Year Plan Document covering agriculture, industry, services sector, Tamil Development and Culture among others to the state government by the first week of September, its Deputy Chairman M Naganathan announced this evening.

In an informal chat with reporters after delivering the valedictory address at the first Tamil Science Conference organized by the SRM University at suburban Kattankulathur, he said it would be a final and consolidated report of the commission covering all sectors.

Almost all the 33 expert and working groups, constituted for this purpose, had submitted their reports to the Commission, which would study them, consolidate and finalise its report to be submitted to the government.

''We have added a chapter on Tamil Development and Culture. The expert group has submitted the report on 'Uniform Tamil font for encoding' to make Tamil an universally accepted language in the world of computing,'' he added.

Bharathidasan University Vice-Chancellor M Ponnavaikko, who was also present, said as a member of the expert group on Tamil Development and Culture, he represented Tamil Nadu in the Technical committee meeting of the Tamil Unicode Consortium at California in May.

The meeting had agreed in principle for unicoding of Tamil language for universal acceptance and had formed sub-committee to work on standardization of Tamil characters.

The committee would come out with its recommendations by the end of December this year.

Mr Ponnavaikko said steps were taken a few years ago to involve 12 universities to create a lexicon on various subjects, but the project could not take off due to various reasons. ''Efforts are being made to revive it'', he said.

Mr Naganathan also released the conference proceedings on the occasion.

UNI