Short messaging service (SMS) using cell phones is a very popular mode of interaction. However current encoding schemes allow the transmission of only 160 characters in English. On the other hand only seventy characters can be transmitted in Indian languages like Hindi due to the UNICODE format used herein. In this paper, a novel encoding scheme is proposed along with several modifications to standard schemes making them efficient for transmission of Hindi and multilingual text. The encoding schemes allow the transmission of around 160 characters for pure Hindi, and multilingual text. The efficiency of the proposed schemes is evaluated by conducting experiments on a multilingual database specially collected from twitter using dictionary learning. Performance evaluation shows that these encoding schemes allow nearly 160 characters per SMS for messages in both Hindi and multilingual text.