Sanskrit gets the lion's share in language funds

Language funding across 11 years

- Sanjay Maurya

NEW DELHI: The central government spent ₹2532.59 crore on the promotion of Sanskrit between 2014-15 and 2024-25, 17 times the combined spending of ₹147.56 crore on the other five classical Indian languages — Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Malayalam and Odia, according to the data obtained by Hindustan Times through a Right to Information (RTI) application and from public records.

That works out to ₹230.24 crore every year (on average) for Sanskrit and ₹13.41 crore every year for the other five.

Tamil, the highest-funded among the five classical Indian languages, received less than 5% of Sanskrit's total funding, Kannada and Telugu each received less than 0.5%, and Odia and Malayalam each received under 0.2% of Sanskrit's total allocation.