The supported scripts are: Bengali–Assamese, Devanagari, Gujarati, Gurmukhi, Kannada, Malayalam, Odia, Tamil, and Telugu.
ISCII does not encode the writing systems of India that are based on Persian, but its writing system switching codes nonetheless provide for Kashmiri, Sindhi, Urdu, Persian, Pashto and Arabic.
[2]: 462 So ISCII encodes letters with the same phonetic value at the same code point, overlaying the various scripts.
One motivation for the use of a single encoding is the idea that it will allow easy transliteration from one writing system to another.
The code sets for Assamese, Bengali, Gujarati, Gurmukhi, Kannada, Malayalam, Oriya, Tamil, and Telugu are similar, with each Devanagari form replaced by the equivalent form in each writing system[2]: 462 .