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PRANJUL RATHOUR
PRANJUL RATHOUR

Posted on Originally published at pranjulrathour.scult.in

Handwriting recognition for Indian forms: what makes it harder than printed-text OCR

#vision #ocr #handwriting

A student building a form-digitisation tool for a local school found that OCR that worked well on printed textbooks fell apart on handwritten admission forms. Handwriting recognition is a genuinely different problem, not a harder version of the same one.

Why it's harder

  • Handwriting varies wildly between writers; printed text is drawn from a small set of consistent fonts.
  • Forms in India often mix Devanagari and Roman scripts on the same line — a single-script model misses half the content.
  • Scanned or photographed forms add skew, shadows and creases that clean printed-text datasets never include.

A practical approach

Use a vision-capable LLM for handwritten extraction rather than a classic OCR engine trained on printed fonts — modern multimodal models handle messier handwriting meaningfully better. Always keep a human-review step for any field that feeds something consequential, like marks or ID numbers.

See designing an OCR pipeline for PDFs for the printed-text baseline this builds on.

About Pranjul Rathour

Pranjul Rathour, GenAI engineer from Kanpur, in a white turtleneck and black jacket, looking to the side
Pranjul Rathour — GenAI engineer, Kanpur

Pranjul Rathour speaking into a microphone on stage at a MeetKats event
Speaking at a MeetKats event

Pranjul Rathour holding a microphone while answering a question during a session
Taking questions during a session

Pranjul Rathour in a grey suit at Dr. Virendra Swarup Institute of Computer Studies (VSICS), Kanpur
At VSICS, Kanpur

Pranjul Rathour in front of an Integral Startup Foundation hackathon backdrop
At an Integral Startup Foundation hackathon

Pranjul Rathour is a GenAI engineer from Kanpur, India, and CTO at SCULT INDIA, currently shipping production RAG,
fine-tuning and agentic AI systems, mentoring 200+ students through TechVerse Enclave, and judging and speaking at
student hackathons across India. Updated 2026-09-07.

Reach out if you want to talk GenAI, book a campus session, or invite him to judge:

Pranjul Rathour · GenAI engineer, 3x hackathon winner, campus mentor. Open for GenAI roles, hackathon judging, mentorship sessions and guest talks: [email protected] · Invite me to your campus
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