New Delhi: Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Friday said India is witnessing “gauravshali ateet ka punarjagran” — a renaissance of its glorious past — as the government moves ahead with the Gyan Bharatam Mission, an ambitious effort to digitise the country’s vast manuscript heritage.
“A few months ago, I had announced the Gyan Bharatam Mission. In such a short time, we have been organising international conferences. This mission is not a government or academic event. It is going to be the proclamation of India’s consciousness. Through this mission, we are going to digitise thousands of years of knowledge,” Modi said at the second day of the Gyan Bharatam International Conference at Delhi’s Vigyan Bhawan.
The PM also launched the Gyan Bharatam portal, an AI-driven national repository, developed by the culture ministry, where digitised manuscripts will be made publicly accessible. The mission, announced in this year’s Union Budget, aims to conserve and document one crore manuscripts and replaces the slow-paced National Manuscripts Mission, which was initiated in 2003 during the Vajpayee government.
Modi described the experience of seeing manuscripts as “like time travel” .
“Imagine the world hundreds of years ago when there were no modern materials. At that time, our ancestors depended on intellectual resources. But still, the people of India had built big universities and libraries,” he said.
He noted that lakhs of old manuscripts were burnt and destroyed in the past but the sheer volume of those that survived are proof of how deeply earlier generations valued knowledge.
“India’s knowledge tradition is rich because its foundation rests on preservation, innovation, addition, adaptation,” he added, noting that while the geography of princely states has changed, India’s history has remained intact and manuscripts are evidence of that continuity and “unity in diversity”.
These manuscripts span a gamut of subjects, including philosophy, medicine, metaphysics, art, astronomy, architecture.
“When countries of the world have artifacts, they preserve them as national treasures, but India has a whole treasure of manuscripts,” he said. “India is going to present this glory of its to the world with pride.”
Beyond preservation, Modi said the Gyan Bharatam Mission is meant to expand research and protect India’s traditional systems from misuse.
“This mission will curb intellectual piracy. This will open many domains of research. If digitisation happens, the scope of academic research will increase,” he said. AI, meanwhile, will accelerate the digitisation process and bring the scattered collections into a single repository.
Also present at the event were Culture Minister Gajendra Shekhawat, president of the Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts (IGNCA) Ram Bahadur Rai, RSS leader Suresh Soni, Acharya Balkrishna, culture secretary Vivek Aggarwal, former RBI governor Shaktikanta Das and mathematician Manjul Bhargava.
The mission comes just in time, according to Shekhawat, as many of the manuscripts are in a state of disrepair and disintegration.
“Manuscripts are a bridge between different cultures. It’s a valuable treasure,” he added.
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India’s manuscript mission
The three-day conference, which began on Thursday under the theme ‘Reclaiming India’s Knowledge Legacy through Manuscript Heritage’, brought together scholars, conservationists, technologists, and policy experts to discuss ways of revitalising the country’s manuscript wealth.
PM Modi attended presentations by working groups and viewed a short film on the Gyan Bharatam Mission, which described India’s manuscript tradition and called the initiative “a renaissance of the Indian knowledge system” and a “revolution”.
He also visited an exhibition showcasing rare manuscripts such as the Kautilya Arthashastra and Ayodhya Mahatmya, alongside scholarly presentations on manuscript conservation, digitisation technologies, metadata standards, legal frameworks, cultural diplomacy, and the decipherment of ancient scripts.
The Gyan Bharatam Mission was announced by Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman in the Union Budget for 2025-26. The initiative to preserve and promote India’s intellectual heritage is in line with the Modi government’s broader vision of integrating ancient wisdom with modern education and technology. Modi had also mentioned the mission in his Independence Day address this year.
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Recommendations for Gyan Bharatam
Union culture secretary Vivek Aggarwal presented the gist of recommendations from the conference’s six working groups. These ranged from identification and standardisation of manuscripts to script decoding, AI-based preservation, and a library classification system tailored to the Indian Knowledge System (IKS).
Conservationist Sanjay Dhar said one of the biggest gaps was “lack of adequate training among conservation professionals” along with low awareness within institutions and personnel managing the collections.
He recommended four measures: research and analysis of manuscripts, developing India-specific storage norms, training and capacity building, and preventive conservation through standard operating procedures.
On the challenges of digitisation, it was suggested that blockchain technology could ensure secure access and integrity management. Another flagged issue was fragmented ownership, with manuscripts held by private institutions, trusts, and individuals across the country. The proposed fix was a common digital repository that safeguards custodians’ rights, noting also that existing laws do not comprehensively address manuscript-related issues.
A group on cultural diplomacy proposed the announcement of an International Manuscript Day, while Dr Nisha Yadav of the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR) presented recommendations on deciphering the Indus script.
She also reinforced the need for a robust scholarly ecosystem.
“Absence of bilingual or multilingual texts is one of the many challenges,” she said, adding that there is still no consensus on decipherment. Yadav called for a dedicated core team, a research centre, regular publication of new findings, as well as fellowships and grants.
(Edited by Asavari Singh)