The government is the de facto safeguarder of the people's interests; if it drops the ball, it should be taken to task, not the provider of the platform.
Are speakers of Bengali, Tamil, Marathi, Punjabi, etc. really supposed to depend on the Indian government to assure that the Unicode Consortium supports their native tongues? What about speakers of Hindustani/Indo-Iranian languages who do not live in India?
I don't think it's right to pin the blame on India and tell Bengali speakers that they're barking up the wrong tree. If the Unicode Consortium purports to set the standard for the encoding of human speech, then it seems to me that the responsibility should fall squarely on them.
Added later: and there's also CDAC http://cdac.in/index.aspx?id=mlingual which has been at it since 1988.
There are countless ways to reach out to Bengali speakers, only one of which is the Indian government - whatever politics governments may play, a technocratic institution should be focused on getting things correct.
Did you know that the Indian Government has a department for just such a thing, http://tdil.mit.gov.in/ ? What has it been doing all these years?
Added later: there's also CDAC http://cdac.in/index.aspx?id=mlingual . And these are just 2 that I found quickly.
The fact that it is their goal to set the standard for the textual representation of human speech means that they take on that responsibility.
<s>Why is Wikipedia not doing more to translate the 4.7M articles into Bengali? It does claim to be the world's encyclopedia!</s>
Unicode on the other hand is the only way many people have to input and see text in their native language. When one group proposes being the ultimate solution to everyone's problems, and then pushes their standard forward as such, complaints about inadequacies in the solution presented are perfectly fair and valid.
There's no point in taking on a job and then declaring it to be too difficult.
According to the beginning of chapter 12 of the Unicode Standard 7.0:
"The major official scripts of India proper [...] are all encoded according to a common plan, so that comparable characters are in the same order and relative location. This structural arrangement, which facilitates transliteration to some degree, is based on the Indian national standard (ISCII) encoding for these scripts. The first six columns in each script are isomorphic with the ISCII-1988 encoding, except that the last 11 positions, which are unassigned or undefined in ISCII-1988, are used in the Unicode encoding."
The problems with Unicode support for global languages are indeed to be blamed on the Unicord Consortium. Nothing the indian governemnt did prevents the UC from availing themselves of the global knowledge needed to create a good global standard.
Take, for example, Tibetan. The number of Tibetan speakers is minuscule compared to, say, Bengali. But still Tibetan has good support, because enough people took an interest in getting it supported and worked with the UC to get it done.
I agree that this refutes claims that the UC was negligent, but we can still say that they failed to be particularly assiduous in this case.
Side question: does anyone know the story that led to http://unicode.org/charts/PDF/U13A0.pdf ?
EDIT: subjunctive
An increasing corpus of children's literature is printed in Cherokee syllabary today to meet the needs of Cherokee students in the Cherokee language immersion schools in Oklahoma and North Carolina. In 2010, a Cherokee keyboard cover was developed by Roy Boney, Jr. and Joseph Erb, facilitating more rapid typing in Cherokee and now used by students in the Cherokee Nation Immersion School, where all coursework is written in syllabary.[8] The syllabary is finding increasingly diverse usage today, from books, newspapers, and websites to the street signs of Tahlequah, Oklahoma and Cherokee, North Carolina.
Also, Bengali is not just a major language in India, but the national language of an entire country (Bangladesh) with 100m+ people. It really is almost entirely the fault of the Bangladeshi and West Bengali authorities if they can't get their shit together enough to submit a decent proposal to Unicode.