Daijiworld Media Network - Panaji

Panaji, Apr 30: In an effort to establish, develop, propagate and bring out the need for retention of Indian culture, the Goa Varsity is expected to start new courses related to vaastu shastra and jyotish shastra along with ancient Indian languages of Sanskrit, Pali and Prakrit in the academic year 2019-2020.

With this, the university has become one of the few universities to offer higher education in Indic knowledge systems.

Governor Mridula Sinha, who is also the chancellor of Goa University, on April 5 agreed to the formation of four schools under the university, of which the School of Sanskrit and Indic knowledge systems is one. The course is expected to include programmes in ancient texts like manuscriptology, vedic and puranic knowledge, practices like yoga and panchkarma, classical Indian philosophy, literature, poetics, grammatics and computational linguistics.

An executive committee meeting of the Goa University, held on March 15, approved the constitution of four schools. The university also issued a notice regarding the subjects to be offered under each school.

In his 2014 budget, former Goa chief minister Manohar Parrikar promised to set up a Sanskrit Mahavidyalaya to promote education in classical Indian languages. Later, in his 2018 budget speech he said, “Sanskrit language and yoga have been pillars of Indian culture and education.”