To engineer Knowledge Retrieval, to engender the Knowledge Explosion

There are about 45 lakSha ancient manuscripts (450,000) lying neglected in about 4,800 private and public collections in India, and atleast 5 lakSha more, abroad. It is also estimated that another 50 lakSha manuscripts in villages allover remain undocumented.  Many of these documents are not catalogued. Only some of them have ever been published.  

From time immemorial, the only means of knowledge transfer across generations was shruti and smR^iti.  Over time, a percentage of this knowledge was recorded on various media, using different scripts.  Only a percetage of these manuscripts are available today.  Even this small percentage of manuscripts is a large repository of knowledge, encompassing every walk of life.  They are written in 14 different scripts.  

Many of these manuscripts, though rich in content, are in a very poor condition.  Additionally, only a few scholars emain who even know these scripts. For example, 7.5 lakhSha Kashmiri Shaivism manuscripts are written in Sharada script.  Scholars knowledgable in this script number less than the 10.  

Decoding, editing, and publishing of these manuscripts will open up a floodgate on the knowledge stored in them.  The impact this knowledge explosion could have can only to be imagined.  The scholarship required to undertake this effort is immense, but availability is very limited.  It is a sad state of affairs that next to nothing has been done about this in the past couple of decades.

Samskrita Bharati intends to take up the Himalayan task of editing and publishing atleast 10,000 of these manuscripts in the next four or five years.