One of the plates bears 34 characters, which is the longest known single Indus script inscription.
I wonder what that means for decipherment efforts.
Until a bilingual of some sort is found, or an archive of longer texts, probably little headway will be made. Most of those working in the field (that is, not politically motivated non-scholars) agree that the language preserved in the script was agglutinative, but efforts to make it out as an archaic version of Dravidian have failed (and the oldest surviving Dravidian texts are over 1000 years old, that includes some from a Roman-era Red Sea pottery factory); similarly, no one has made Sumerian fit it either.
It’s known to be a writing system, as there’s actually a surviving “welcome to [town name]” type of sign outside one of the old Harappan city sites, but longer texts are mostly lacking, probably because they were originally made on materials which have not survived.