BORI’s 18 Parvas of Mahabharata & Veda Vidya courses most in demand on Bharat Vidya
There has been a good response to our online courses’ platform bharatvidya.com ever since it was inaugurated, with over 53,000 people having visited the website till now. Whereas 1,200 of them have registered for the courses, says official
It’s been a little over a month since finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman was in Pune on September 21 to inaugurate ‘Bharat Vidya’, the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute’s (BORI’s) online platform for various paid and free courses, and more than 53,000 individuals have already visited the website with over 1,200 registering for the various courses.
Bhupal Patwardhan, chairman, executive board, BORI, said, “There has been a good response to our online courses’ platform bharatvidya.com ever since it was inaugurated, with over 53,000 people having visited the website till now. Whereas 1,200 of them have registered for the courses. Currently, there are six online courses available, five of which are paid while the remaining one on ‘Digital Sanskrit learning’ is free, which has got the maximum response from people. Of the total 1,200 registrations, 900 are for the free course whereas 300 are for the paid courses.”
The six online courses currently available include the 18 Parvas of Mahabharata, Kalidas and Bhasa, Fundamentals of Archaeology, Veda Vidya and Bhartiya Darshanshastra, all of which are paid courses with fees ranging from Rs1,400 to Rs2,400. While the free online course is on the ‘Digital Sanskrit Geeta’. The BORI has moved its courses across different streams such as languages, philosophy, science, arts and medical to the online platform.
Asked which paid courses have got the maximum response, Patwardhan said, “There is good response to and registrations for the 18 Parvas of Mahabharata and Veda Vidya as most people want to learn more about the Vedas and Mahabharata. We want to develop our e-content and take it to 1,000 hours of content, reaching out to at least 1 crore people within this one year.”
Parikshit Merjha, who has registered for the free online course, said, “I always wanted to learn Sanskrit words and the oldest language which was even spoken by our Gods according to Hindu mythology. The course designed by Bharat Vidya is very simple to understand and I am looking forward to joining the advanced course after I finish this course.”
The BORI was established in 1917 to preserve and conduct research on manuscripts and rare books brought to the institute from various sources. Later in 1918, the then governor of Bombay, Lord Willingdon, sent the manuscripts’ collection to BORI and ever since, the collection has only been growing. Currently, there are over 28,000 manuscripts in various languages, including Sanskrit, Prakrit, Urdu, Arabic, Persian, Devanagari, Kannada and more. Whereas there are over 1.50 lakh books on different subjects, and their digitalisation has been underway for the last one year.
