In a first, India to map its manuscript heritage from today

NEW DELHI: In a first-of-its-kind exercise that starts on Monday, the ministry of culture will launch a three-month-long nationwide survey to map India's manuscript heritage.

From the district level upwards, the extensive exercise aims to locate all manuscripts in different parts of the country and create a consolidated database and a national digital repository of the same on a central portal of 'Gyan Bharatam Mission'.

The manuscripts existing in collections and institutions and those identified during the survey with individual custodians will also be geotagged to address conservation, preservation and digitisation requirements.

Culture secretary Vivek Aggarwal said the survey teams would use the Gyan Bharatam app to upload the details and technology will be leveraged going forward to enable digitisation in a standardised format to eventually make them accessible.

The survey is in keeping with the vision document , New Delhi Declaration, adopted in Sept last year at the Gyan Bharatam conference in Vigyan Bhawan, where PM Narendra Modi had said the mission would be the "proclamation of India's culture, literature and consciousness".

Noting that India had the world's largest collection of estimated manusc-ripts (about 1 crore), the PM had said their digitisation under the 'Gyan Bharatam Mission', which was announced in the 2025-26 Budget, would also curb "intellectual piracy".

On the survey exercise, the culture secretary said committees at the state and district levels had been formed under the chairmanship of the chief secretary and the district magistrate, respectively. The ministry is also working on the interface with manuscripts already digitised by institutions and state govts. These are estimated to be more than a million.

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