In the recently held Gyan Bharatam Conference in Delhi, PM Modi praised the knowledge legacy of India and said that Gyan Bharatam Mission²is set to become the voice of India’s culture, literature and consciousness³. He also launched the Gyan Bharatam Portal- a dedicated digital platform to accelerate manuscript digitisation, preservation, and public access⁴.

What does it mean

Celebrating the manuscripts as a part of India’s Civilizational Heritage and being the trusted custodian of heritage in the eyes of the world⁵, the Gyan Bharatam Mission will also strive to unify the shared heritage of humanity across the countries. Digitization of manuscripts would also help regulate intellectual piracy.

Following this, given the diversity of materials upon which the manuscripts are written, from leaves to copper plates, the Culture Ministry is drawing up separate SoPs for different materials in order to effectively locate, preserve, and decode India’s vast manuscript wealth. The use of AI in decoding, understanding, and interpreting Indian manuscripts is already yielding promising results. Manuscripts must be digitised and preserved in the digital age. Digitization provides a way to preserve their context without risking damage to the original one. The scale and approach of Gyan Bharatam is ambitious, and official reports affirm the plan to survey, record, preserve, digitise and make available over 1 crore manuscripts in five years’ time. The Mission is not just a matter of scanning repositories, it’s about rejuvenating civilizational memory, empowering scholarship and recovering India’s textual heritage.

Digitisation and use of AI would make the manuscripts stand the test of time and would boost the interpretation from ancient languages to modern ones in significantly lesser time. The Government’s dedicated focus and allotment of funds towards the preservation of manuscripts is expected to boost the preservation of manuscripts and present a uniform digitized version with the modern tools and technology at disposal. The move would not only present to the world the heritage that India has been carrying since thousands of years, but would also set a stage for interpreting and having access to the manuscripts from different lands.