What is the Status of OCR in Indian languages?

OCR for Indian languages has made significant progress, with many tools now supporting scripts like Devanagari, Bengali, Tamil, and Telugu. Solutions such as Google Tesseract and Microsoft Azure OCR offer robust support for printed text recognition in Indian languages. However, challenges remain in recognizing handwritten text and degraded documents, as the complexity of Indic scripts and lack of high-quality datasets limit accuracy. Ongoing research and the use of deep learning models are improving performance. Initiatives like Google’s Project Sandhan and specialized regional OCR systems are helping bridge the gap. While OCR for Indian languages is not yet perfect, it is steadily improving and becoming more accessible.