> Sanskrit is only spoken in India by an estimated 25,000 people out of a population of more than one billion, the university said.

This is a somewhat misleading explanation of what Sanskrit is. The Sanskrit language is the ancestor of many northern Indian languages, similarly to how Latin is the ancestor of the Romance languages; Pāṇini wrote his famous grammatical description of Classical Sanskrit around 500 BC, give or take a hundred years or so. Sanskrit is of great significance both historically and religiously, and has been studied continuously since that time. There has also been a recent language revival effort, which is presumably what the reference to ‘25000 speakers’ is talking about.