Taking Sanskrit to the masses

Institutions join hands to generate web content

Rashtriya Sanskrit Vidyapeetha Vice-Chancellor V. Muralidhara Sarma addressing a workshop in Tirupati on Wednesday.

A giant leap was taken on Wednesday in taking Sanskrit to the masses, when several national institutes joined hands to achieve synergy. The best of brains from the domains of literary, academic, pedagogical and technological platforms converged for the mammoth task.

Representatives of Rashtriya Sanskrit Sansthan (New Delhi), Lal Bahadur Shastri Rashtriya Sanskrit Vidyapeetha (New Delhi), Sanskrit Samvardha Parishad (New Delhi), Sanskrit Academy (Melkote), Vaidika Samshodhana Mandala (Pune), Karnataka Sanskrit University (Bengaluru), Kalidasa Sanskrit University (Ramtek, Nagpur), Samskruta Bharati (Bengaluru), Chinmaya Sanskrit Vishwa Vidyapeeth (Veliyanad, Ernakulam) and Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur participated in the two-day national workshop on ‘Digitised Sanskrit Corpus’, under way on the Rashtriya Sanskrit Vidyapeetha campus here on Wednesday.

They not only discussed the status of projects in progress and the future tasks on hand, but also dwelt upon upgrading to the latest technology in terms of platform and operating system so as to generate searchable content at the click of a mouse.

While so many institutes have converted paper content into digital format over a decade, thus giving scope for duplication, the current exercise is to avoid redundancy and also adapt to the latest technology available in the world of web. Speaking to

The Hindu on the sidelines of the workshop, Rashtriya Sanskrit Sansthan Vice-Chancellor P.N. Shastry said that the larger goal was to take Sanskrit texts to the reach of every researcher, and ultimately benefit society.

Lakhs of pages of digital content generated all these years was now being scrutinised for literary clarity, scholastic authenticity, technological congruence and system compatibility, besides working towards ensuring uniformity in search definitions. “The Tirupati Vidyapeetha has alone digitised 804 textbooks running into six lakh e-pages”, announced its Vice-Chancellor V. Muralidhara Sarma.

The institutes will be inking a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) to define the scope of the project, identify new content and also enable transliteration, Prof. Sarma said.