The proposed unified script for nine Indian languages, developed by researchers at IIT Madras, is known as:

The Bharati script is a unified script proposed by a research team at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Madras, led by Professor V. Srinivasa Chakravarthy. It was designed to write nine major Indian languages with a single, simple script. The languages include Hindi (and other Devanagari languages such as Marathi), Bengali, Gujarati, Punjabi (Gurmukhi), Odia, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada and Malayalam.

How it works:

• The script takes simple shapes for letters, borrowed mostly from Devanagari and Gujarati, and in some cases from English (Roman) letters, so that they are easy to write and recognise.
• It is a "phonetic" script, so the same sound is written the same way in every language.
• The team developed tools, such as a multi-lingual optical character recognition (OCR) system, to read documents written in Bharati, as well as a finger-spelling method for sign language based on it.

The main aim is to make it easier for Indians to read and learn each other's languages, and to remove the barrier of different scripts, since many Indian languages are similar in sound and vocabulary but are written in different scripts. The proposal was widely reported around 2019, but it is a research proposal and has not been officially adopted.

India has many scripts, most of which developed from the ancient Brahmi script, used in the inscriptions of Ashoka. Others include:

Kharosthi: used in north-west India in ancient times; written from right to left.

Why not the other options?

• ✗Brahmi is the ancient script from which most Indian scripts came.
• ✗Sharada was used in Kashmir.
• ✗Modi was used for Marathi.