Handwritten Devanagari COnjunct COnsonants (HDCOCO) Dataset

Handwritten optical character recognition (OCR) for Devanagari has advanced rapidly, yet conjunct consonants remain a major bottleneck due to complex ligatures and diverse writing styles. We introduce Handwritten Devanagari COnjunct COnsonants (HDCOCO), a curated dataset of 50,020 handwritten samples spanning 41 conjunct classes, collected across multiple institutions and public venues to capture wide demographic and stylistic variation. We validate HDCOCO through embedding-space analyses, PCA\/t-SNE cluster structure, centroid-distance difficulty scoring, and stratified train--test splits matched by difficulty, confirming class separability and fair evaluation conditions. Our contribution provides a solid foundation for state-of-the-art Devanagari OCR on real-world handwriting.