Who runs it
Mishra.info is run by Dhruv Mishra. It is not affiliated with any sabha, samaj, trust or organisation, and it does not speak for one. There is no committee behind it and no editorial board - which is worth stating plainly, because a heritage site can easily be mistaken for an institution.
That has an obvious consequence: everything here reflects one person's reading and one person's errors. The remedy is the correction process, which is genuinely used rather than decorative.
How it is funded
The identity service pays for the site: the domain, the mail service, hosting and the time spent writing. There is no advertising, no sponsored content, and nothing on these pages is written because someone paid for it to be.
If the service grows enough to cover more than its costs, the surplus goes into the same place: more research, more pages, and translation.
Editorial standards
Four rules, applied to every page:
- Tradition is labelled as tradition. Where a story is a community origin narrative rather than a documented event, it says so. This is the difference between a heritage site and a caste pamphlet.
- Disagreement is stated, not smoothed over. Where sutra traditions differ on a pravara, or scholars differ on an identification, both are given.
- No rankings. No gotra, community or lineage is presented as superior to another, and material framed that way is not published here regardless of who sends it.
- Living people appear with consent. Names, family details and photographs of living individuals are published only when they or their family have asked for it.
What this project is not
It is not a caste organisation, a matrimonial service, a certification authority for lineage claims, or an arbiter of anyone's status. It cannot issue you a gotra certificate, and nobody can - that is not a document that exists.
It also does not host a public forum. That is a deliberate omission: moderating one properly takes more time than writing the site, and moderating one badly turns a heritage project into something else entirely.
Where it is going
The next work, in order: more depth on the gotra and lineage pages, Hindi versions of everything, family history pages contributed by families, and - only once there is enough demand and a proper privacy design - an opt-in member directory.
Self-service renewals and an online payment gateway come when the manual process stops being manageable, and not before. Doing it by hand is slow, but it means every name is looked at by a person.
Get in touch
Corrections, family records, and questions about the service all go through the same form.