Niranjana, the pseudonym of Kulkund Shivarao, is a prolific Kannada writer who has penned more than sixty books in the course of his career spanning nearly five decades. In an initiative to promote the rich heritage of Kannada literature, the Kannada Wikimedia community in collaboration with the Centre for Internet and Society-Access to Knowledge programme (CIS-A2K) are re-licensing 55 of Niranjana’s works under a Creative Commons license. These works will be digitized and be made freely available on Kannada Wikisource, thereby enabling open and free access for the works. This is also the single largest and most comprehensive individual collection of a writer to be released under a Creative Commons license (CC-BY-SA 4.0 ) in any Indian language till date.This process was greatly assisted by the initiative taken by Dr. Tejaswini Niranjana, the daughter of Niranjana, to ensure that his workers are easily accessible to Kannada speakers around the world. Kannada Wikimedia hopes that this will be the first step towards many more authors making their works available on Kannada Wikisource
