Kārakas from ancient Paninian grammar form a concise set of semantic roles that capture crucial aspect of sentence meaning pivoted on the action verb. In this paper, we propose employing a kāraka-based approach for retrieving answers in Indic question-answering systems. To study and evaluate this novel approach, empirical experiments are conducted over large benchmark corpora in Hindi and Marathi. The results obtained demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method. Additionally, we explore the varying impact of two approaches for extracting kārakas. The literature surveyed and experiments conducted encourage hope that kāraka annotation can improve communication with machines using natural languages, particularly in low-resource languages.