Dr Shivarama Karanth Balavana Award for K P Rao

Puttur: Dr Shivarama Karanth Balavana Award will be presented to multi-faceted scholar and software expert Kinnikambala Padmanabha Rao.

K P Rao is credited with the development of the Kannada keyboard and software to use Kannada language on computers.

He was born on 29 February 1940 in a remote village near Mangalore and completed his Bachelor of Science in chemistry from St. Aloysius College, Mangalore.

He then joined the Training School of Atomic Energy Establishment, Trombay of the Department of Atomic Energy in August 1959. After completion of training, Rao took up a job assignment in the Electronics division of the BARC. At the age of 55, Rao took up teaching.

In the 1980s, K.P Rao provided a keyboard layout to Dr.Srinivasan, Canada, who had developed an editor for DOS to type Kannada. The text was input with the standard English keyboard and the typed text was saved in ASCII.

The editor was dedicated to his grammar teacher, Sediyapu. The Kannada version was popularly known as the Sediyapu Editor and the keyboard layout was known as the KPRao layout which later was accepted by Karnataka Govt. as the official keyboard.