The past few decades have witnessed an intensive research on optical character recognition (OCR) for Roman, Chinese, and Japanese scripts. A lot of work has been also reported on OCR efforts for various Indian scripts, like Devanagari, Bangla, Oriya, Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam, Kannada, Gurmukhi, Gujarati, etc. In this paper, we present a review of OCR work on Indian scripts, mainly on Bangla and Devanagari-the two most popular scripts in India. We have summarized most of the published papers on this topic and have also analysed the various methodologies and their reported results. Future directions of research in OCR for Indian scripts have been also given.