We put the foundational texts, their commentaries and recordings of their recitation on the web, free, so anyone can read, search, cite and listen to them, verse by verse. Nine of our sites are open today.
This is a gift to a public good, in the way a public library is. It is not an investment. There is no return, no share and no revenue to the trust from the texts. What your money buys is the mūla made digital, checked by vidvāns and kept open to everyone, permanently.
The trust is registered under 12A and 80G, so donations qualify for tax deduction. Companies can give from their CSR budget (CSR-1 registration CSR00111219).
The mūla, its commentaries and its recitation, each verse at its own address, read and signed off by vidvāns. Like a road, it is built once and used by everyone.
An upanyāsakar's discourse, a Harikathā, a children's story book, a comic, a course, a reading list, an app. Each can link back to the verse it draws on, so the listener can check it and hear it.
It pays for something specific that does not exist today, at a price we have measured. ₹49 turns an hour of recorded discourse into an edition you can play verse by verse. ₹400 pays a pāṭhaśālā student for an hour of reading verses for the index. The funding page lists eight results, each with its price, its time and a meter of where it stands.
Most people will meet these texts through layer 2: one upanyāsakar's discourse reaches thousands, and every one that links to the verse sends them to it. Readers already use the sites closely: they sent 820 reports of mistakes in the Mahābhārata in three weeks.
We do not yet publish visitor numbers for the sites. We will add them here.
A text, once checked and published, stays published. Hosting and audio storage for all the sites are budgeted at ₹2 lakh a year. Carrying the whole team for a year, so the work keeps growing, costs ₹46.5 lakh. Each funded result is finished work, and it does not lapse when the funding ends.
Try one of these. Each takes about thirty seconds.
Because the work is shared and open. 513,887 verses sit in one index that every site checks against, so each new text makes all the others better. 17 of the 44 branches of the literature already have something you can open today. The full pitch maps all of them, including the ones still to do.
The full pitch is a tour of all nine sites, the map of the tradition, the work still to do, and who we are. It takes about an hour, longer if you open the sites as you go.