Chandigarh: A year after Panjab University announced Sanskrit and Punjabi courses for Indian-origin students abroad, the initiative has had a muted start, with just four students enrolling against around 60 seats in the first batch. Only one of them being a foreign national.The programmes were initially planned under the newly created Institute of Global Studies (IGS), later shifted back to the respective language departments after the university scaled down IGS’s academic role, and have now begun with three students in Sanskrit and one in Punjabi.The lone foreign national is an American girl enrolled in the Punjabi programme. All three students in the Sanskrit programme are Indians, despite the course being specifically designed for NRI students with little or no background in Sanskrit.Faculty members associated with the programmes said the courses could not be advertised adequately among the intended overseas audience this time. They said they hoped wider publicity and outreach before the next cycle would improve enrolment.The journey of the programmes has itself undergone several changes. In Sept 2025, PU had announced that the Sanskrit and Punjabi certificate courses would be developed under IGS and were expected to begin in Jan 2026. The university had said the courses were being created specifically for Indian-origin NRI students and would use blended teaching, combining online learning with interactive sessions.At the time, the Sanskrit proposal was more expansive. The department had been working on a one-year certificate course in Sanskrit and Sanskriti, while it was also asked to prepare courses around the Bhagavad Gita and Upanishads for NRI students. The Punjabi department had proposed a course titled “Punjabi language, literature and culture: Foundations and global perspectives”, covering language, literature, culture, folklore, traditions and performing arts.However, by Jan 2026, PU had decided that IGS would not run academic courses of its own. The Sanskrit and Punjabi programmes were shifted to their respective departments, with IGS retaining a coordinating role for international collaborations and outreach. The change came as PU also moved its BBA-MBA integrated programme back to the University Institute of Applied Management Sciences.The Sanskrit programme that has now started is a six-month, four-credit online certificate course with two papers- Basic Sanskrit Language and Gita and Upanishads. Its syllabus includes Sanskrit script and pronunciation, numbers one to 50, sandhi, basic grammar, verb forms, sentence formation from English or Hindi into Sanskrit and everyday vocabulary.The second paper covers selected verses from the Bhagavad Gita, the first 10 mantras of the Ish Upanishad and important Vedic mantras, besides teaching students to introduce themselves in Sanskrit.The course document specifically says it is designed for NRI students with little or no background in Sanskrit. It also says the programme seeks to use the Gita and Upanishads to introduce Sanskrit while connecting the texts with ethics, mental well-being, leadership and self-development.The first batch, therefore, has so far drawn little from the overseas audience it was created to reach, with domestic students making up three-fourths of the four enrolments.
