With the advent of computerization considerable work has been undertaken to facilitate the us of Indian languages on computers. These activities were generally limited to specific languages and were independent exercises of various organizations Thus making data-interchange impossible. In such a scenario, it was important to have a common standard for coding Indian scripts. GIST has played an important role in establishment of Indian standards.

In 1991, the Bureau of Indian Standards adopted the Indian Standard Code for Information Interchange (ISCII), the ISCII standard that was evolved by a standardization committee, of which C-DAC was a member, under Department of Electronics during 1986-88. The ISCII document is available as IS13194:1991 from the BIS offices.

All GIST products are based on ISCII. Other than this, it has been used by IBM for PC-DOS, Apple for ILK, and several companies are developing products and solutions based on this representation. This has been made mandatory for the data being collected by organizations like The Election Commission, and for projects as Land Records Project etc.