In Bhārata, we find names of places written in English script on highway signage, online maps, shop signage, etc. However, the limitations of the English script fails to convey the real name of the place. This isn't a problem to those who already know the place. But for those who don't, the English names can be misleading.

For instance, those who already know have no confusion reading Kota; but those don't known, can read it as कोट or कोत.

A harder example is reading Thrissur (a place in Kerala), which can be read with quite a number of different ways as per the following possible combinations.

The good news is that we already have multiple solutions for the correct transliteration of our languages, such as IAST, iTrans, ISO 15919 and Harvard-Kyoto.

The Harvard-Kyoto transliteration seems very practical as it does not use special characters but solely rely on existing English characters. However, it gets non aesthetically long with certain words, and can conflict with English pronunciation of the same letters.

The ISO 15919 transliteration, on the other hand, seems to be very easy and covers almost all Bhāratīya languages. And what's even better is that the correct transliteration doesn't diverge too far away from the existing wrong transliteration. Here is how it looks:

Conclusion

We discussed the "why" and "how" factors for using the right transliteration. Adopting it will be challenging in the beginning; especially with respect to typing the correct transliteration. This is why we are building a transliterator and also a proper Bhāratīya physical keyboard.