In India, many people use Devanagari script for documentation. There has been a significant improvement in the research related to the recognition of printed as well as handwritten Devanagari text in the past few years. Basically Character recognition techniques associate a symbolic identity with the image of a character. Since creating an algorithm with a one hundred percent correct recognition rate is quite probably impossible in our world of noise and different font styles, it is important to design character recognition algorithms with these failures in mind so that when mistakes are inevitably made, they will at least be understandable and predictable to the person working with the program. An attempt is made to address the most important results reported so far and it is also tried to highlight the beneficial directions of the research till date.