Indian Traditional shastras and their contemporary relevance

The greatness of Paninian tradition is well recognised by the scholars. Anusaaraka is a practical demonstration of application of traditional shastras.

Contemporary Relevance of Panini:

One of the greatest monuments of human intelligence (Bloomfield) is only beginning to claim its rightful position in linguistics. Many of the insights of Panini's grammar still remain to be recaptured, but those that are already understood constitute a major theoretical contribution.

--- Paul Kiparsky ( from 'The encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics', Asher, pp 2923)


... he(Panini) could devise an extremely compact data representation for a very rich grammatical formalisation. This applies not only to the pratyaharas, but also in general to his exception control structure, which is strongly evocative of object-oriented programming.
To my opinion, Panini deserves to be recognized not just as an early linguist, but in some way as the founding father of informatics.

  --- Prof. Gerard Huet INRIA, France ( Personal communication with Vineet Chaitanya)

Practical application of traditional shastras:

Since computer is an Information processing device, so naturally Informatics forms a natural basis for its application to any concrete problem.

Anusaaraka is an application of Information Dynamics (inspired by Panini) to reduce the language barrier using computers.

(Note: This is crucial, because, a layman does not appreciate the scholarly ideas, he only appreciates the concrete practical applications.
The contribution of Panini (in the field of Linguistics) is no less than that of Newton (in the field of mechanics). However, a layman is not familiar with Panini because of the above reason.

With the advent of computers, now it has become possible to device a system called Anusaaraka which is a practical application of Panini's grammar.)