IIT Roorkee to launch online spoken Sanskrit camp for teachers

The Sanskrit Club of the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Roorkee, is planning to launch an online spoken Sanskrit camp for teachers.

The decision follows an online course on spoken Sanskrit organised by the club that saw over 5,000 delegates from 32 countries taking part.

The Sanskrit Club of IIT Roorkee will also have a new course for the online Sanskrit course participants who have aced all five levels.

The Sanskrit Club at IIT Roorkee is an initiative to revive and promote the growth of Sanskrit language. Sanskrit texts, be it the Vedas, the Puranas, the Tantras, or the treatises by other Indian saints and writers, are a rich source of knowledge.

“We, as students of a premier technological institution of this country, have taken it upon ourselves to approach Sanskrit with a scientific temperament and bring back to the world all the literary, technological, philosophical and scientific genius, that dwells within the texts of this language,” the members of the club said.

The course on Sanskrit was an initiative called Subhashitam Samskritam and was organised online by Sanskrit Club of IIT-Roorkee and Samskrita Bharati, an NGO. It was launched in July 2020 by Prime Minister Modi and Union education minister Ramesh Pokhriyal Nishank.

Above 2,000 people are expected to clear the final evaluation. All course material is being made available through the Sanskrit club’s website. The 79 lectures and supporting videos related to the course available on YouTube have received aggregate views of over 1 million so far.

The aim of the initiative, the institute claims, was to “create awareness about the significance of Sanskrit among the young generation”. Level-1 of the course imparted free spoken Sanskrit lessons via the WebEx platform and YouTube live. Levels 2-5 covered usage and grammar concepts in Sanskrit. Online exams were conducted at the end of each level.

IIT-Roorkee director Ajit K. Chaturvedi called upon the Sanskrit Club to revisit Sanskrit literature that would be relevant for current students from the research perspective.

Apart from the curriculum, extra-curricular activities such as Kahoot-based quizzes, the Sanskrit Club has also played an important role in launching the SAMARPANAM or SAMskritaaya ARPANAM — a network of students and faculty members from institutions of national importance to promote Sanskrit.