ISCII – Indian Standard Code for Information Interchange (ISCII) is the system of handling the character of Indian local languages. This is a 8 – bit coding system. Therefore it can handle 256 (2⁸) characters. It is recognized by Bureau of Indian Standards (BIS). It is integrated with Unicode.

The supported scripts are: Assamese, Bengali (Bangla), Devanagari, Gujarati, Gurmukhi, Kannada, Malayalam, Oriya, Tamil, and Telugu. ISCII does not encode the writing systems of India based on Arabic, but its writing system switching codes none the less provide for Kashmiri, Sindhi, Urdu, Persian, Pashto and Arabic. The Arabic – based writing systems were subsequently encoded in the PASCII encoding.

ISCII is an 8 – bit encoding. The lower 128 code points are plain ASCII, the upper 128 code points are ISCII – specific. In addition to the code points representing characters, ISCII makes use of a code point with mnemonic ATR that indicates that the following byte contains one of two kinds of information. One set of values changes the writing system until the next writing system indicator or end – of – line.