IIT Kanpur Website on Ancient Indian Texts Gets Sudden Traffic
The website had begun registering around 24,000 hits a day, from its usual 500 daily visitors.
A decade-old dormant website containing ancient Indian texts, and which is spearheaded by the faculty of IIT Kanpur, reportedly witnessed a sudden surge in its online readership, reports ANI.
The website, which has allegedly been around since the 1990s, contains Indian ancient texts such as the Vedas and the Shastras.
According to The Indian Express, the faculty members of IIT Kanpur in October found that their 10-year old web page ‘Gita Supersite’ had begun registering around 24,000 hits a day, which is a far cry from its daily average of 500.
This seems to be the only possible reason for the sudden surge, the faculty members told ANI as well.
Prabhakar was also the one who led the team that designed the database and translated texts such as The Gita and the Upanishads in the institute about a decade ago. The website was the result of a 20-year-old project to make ancient Indian language accessible to the public, even before Google and Unicode, The Indian Express report adds.
The aim of the project, Prabhakar also told the newspaper, was to convert these ancient Indian texts into contemporary formats that were both easy to understand and accessible to the modern audience.
Speaking about how the surge was possibly due to the Whatsapp message which was circulating, he said: “This is the power of social media. This is all we can put a finger on behind this surge,” the report adds.
The report also mentions that Manindra Agarwal, Director of IIT Kanpur, confirmed this by saying that nothing new had been added to the database.
(With inputs from ANI and Indian Express)
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