Source: TW
At a very conservative estimate, there exist today some 3000 MSS of Bhartṛhari. Most of these, being hidden away in private collections, will be destroyed unused by the action of time, air, rain, mice, white ants and all other vermin except scholars.
The greatest factor that prevents this material from becoming useful is the sloth and negligence of their owners, who rarely know what they possess but are even more rarely willing to have their collections examined. In one case, this was due to the fear of losing alchemical formulae which might have been hidden away in the mass of scrap paper by some ancestor; in several other cases, it was due to the fear of titles to property being proved defective by examination of the old bundles.
Our public collections, apart from regarding red tape as ample preservative for the MSS, also leave a great deal to be desired. There are no microfilm facilities; copyists are inaccurate, catalogues misleading; correct information is rarely supplied. It has too often been my unfortunate experience to have to pay from two to ten times as much as the original estimate for scribes’ work, at distant centres in India, which did not follow the very simple instructions given nor yielded the information sought. It is a general rule (Kosambi’s law 1) that the actual use-value of a MS is inversely proportional to the fuss made in lending it.