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A fundamental area, where many enthusiastic individuals and organizations are getting tired in this field of research on Vedic Sciences, is the unavailability of source books. The references of books on Vedic sciences are available to us in the commentaries of Vedas, Puranas and Kavyas, in the form of quotations, but the original books are not available to us, due to several reasons of history. A tentative list of such quoted books was published by I-SERVE five years back. The few that escaped combustions and destructions during those days, are scattered in the nooks and corners of India and it is now very difficult to locate, recognize and fetch them. A lot of energy of the researchers is being exhausted in fetching the source books itself. Hence, I-SERVE took a decision to create a knowledge bank for the common benefit of all the researchers of this field. As a first step to achieve this, I-SERVE took up a special project to prepare “Catalogues of Ancient Scientific Manuscripts and Out of Print Books – State wise”. To start with, I-SERVE took up the survey of Andhra Pradesh and this project was co- sponsored by Tirumala Tirupathi Devastahanams of Tirupathi(TTD). The initial project was completed and the 1st copy of the catalogue for Andhra Pradesh was released in December 2008. Now I-SERVE is planning to extend the survey to other states, namely Karnataka and Orissa.

WORD SEARCH COMPUTER DRIVES FOR DEVANAGARI SCRIPT:

Of all the ancient Indian sciences, only three branches are alive today, at least to some extent, in the form of tradition. They are – Ayurveda, Astronomy and Vedic Mathematics. I-SERVE has focused its interest on these areas and designed many R&D projects. As it started its work, it quickly understood that, lack of Word Search Computer Engine Drives for Devanagari script is standing as a big hurdle for the progress of this research, since a lot of books in this field are available in Devanagari Script alone. Charaka Samhita :I-SERVE focused its eyes on this draw back, consulted many experts in the concerned fields, engaged faculty, strived for more than two years and finally brought out computer search drives for Devanagari script. To test the efficiency and user -friendliness of the Visual Base interfaces used in the above process, I-SERVE took Charaka Samhita, a well known classical text book of Ayurveda, got it typed along with its English translation, uploaded the interfaces and released the e-book of “Charaka Samhita” along with its English translation, in December 2008. Now, any one can type any word of Charaka Samhita in English letters on the keyboard of any common computer and get all the Slokas containing that particular word, along with the previous sloka and the succeeding Sloka, plus their English translation, displayed on the screen of the computer.

This achievement is enthusing many researchers in the field of Ayurveda and they are using the Charaka Samhita CDs extensively. The search drives developed can be utilized for any book in Devanagari script (i.e, Sanskrit or Hindi). This will surely enhance the speed of research in the field of ancient sciences.

Word Search Engines for Sushruta Samhita:

Sushruta Samhita is yet another classical work of Ayurveda and this important work is being taken up for adopting the Word Search Engines. This involves a lot of translation, typing , proof reading and technical adoption work.