Foreword

National Council for Promotion of Urdu Language, an autonomous organization under the Ministry of Human Resource Development, Department of Secondary & Higher Education, Govt. of India, has been set up to promote, develop and propagate Urdu language. Urdu is one of the important national languages of India and is spoken throughout the country. There are large number of Indians who know the language, can speak it, but do not know the script. In order to further popularize Urdu language and its script NCPUL started six month's certificate course in Urdu through English and Hindi medium on Distance education mode in 2001, which has now been upgraded to one year Diploma Course. This Course received an overwhelming response throughout the country with thousands of earners getting themselves enrolled in this course.

It has been the endeavour of the Council to prepare linguistically oriented courseware to suit the objectives of the course. Different materials have been developed and used for this course so far. Based on the experience of past several years of running this course and suggestions and opinions of learners and other concerned experts, the courseware is revised from time to time. The present material is part of an effort towards that direction to provide the best possible learning material to the learners. "Urdu For All-An Introduction to Urdu script" hopefully shall meet all requirements of Urdu writing system and make learning process interesting.

I am thankful to all experts who have been associated in preparation of this earning material. I am thankful to my colleagues Dr. Roop Krishen Bhat, Ms. Shama Yazdani and Ms. Zeshan Fatima for taking the responsibility of getting this material developed in the shortest possible time. I hope that the students and other well wishers of Urdu will find this book very useful.- Dr. M. Hamidullah Bhat, Director