Nirmala Sitharaman at the launch of Sanskrit Heritage Model and Platform, at Madras Sanskrit College in Chennai on Tuesday.
| Photo Credit: JOTHI RAMALINGAM B
Union Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman on Tuesday stressed on the need to use AI to help ordinary people to navigate great works like those of poet Kalidasa.
Speaking after launching Sanskrit Heritage Model at The Madras Sanskrit College in association with Articul8, in Mylapore, she said AI could also perhaps be used to identify to what extent Indian languages including Tamil and Sanskrit have spread based on manuscripts, palm leaves and copper plates.
She said that such efforts could make our literary treasures more accessible to everyone anywhere in the world at any time. The Finance Minister congratulated the Madras Sanskrit College for having striven through extremely tough times and kept it’s integrity, and worked to preserve Sanskrit, Sanskrit knowledge and spreading Sanskrit knowledge. To ensure continuity of its work, the College had to plan it’s future and since Sanskrit had an inherent advantage — of being a structured language — it can be adapted to technology.
Ramesh Mahalingam, director, Madras Sanskrit College, said it was a monumentous day for the institution that stepped into the digital world in 2017 through which 20,000 persons have benefitted. Determined to preserve intellectual excellence, the College will become first institute in the country to have AI powered knowledge model.
Arun K. Subramaniyan, founder and CEO, Articul8 AI, said that “Sanskrit has a formal grammar that specifies, rule by rule, how every correct word is built. That means it is a language you can compute. We encoded Panini’s Ashtadhyayi, the 2,500-year-old grammar behind that rule set, as a live compiler and verifier inside the system, so every response is generated and verified by the same machinery before it reaches the scholar. The same rigor extends past Sanskrit”.
Ananthanarayanan Shanmugam, Managing Director, Articul8 AI, India, said that the Sanskrit Heritage Model and Platform will continue to evolve through testing and feedback from Sanskrit scholars. The approach is designed to extend to other Indic languages and knowledge systems where language, rules and source material play an important role.
N. Gopalaswamy, former CEC and president, VKISET Trust, and S. Ramadorai, former CEO and MD, Tata Consultancy Services graced the occasion.
Published – September 16, 2026 05:30 am IST
