Gyan Bharatam Mission: India’s Flagship Drive to Preserve and Digitise Manuscript Heritage

New Delhi: Gyan Bharatam, announced in the Union Budget 2025–26, is a flagship initiative of the Ministry of Culture, Government of India, aimed at unearthing, safeguarding and preserving the country’s vast manuscript heritage through a coordinated, technology-driven national framework.

Aligned with the vision of Viksit Bharat 2047, the mission seeks to harmonise cultural preservation with human capital development, ensuring that India’s civilisational knowledge continues to inform scholarship, innovation and public discourse. The Standing Finance Committee has sanctioned ₹491.66 crore for the period 2025–2031 to support the initiative.

This information was provided by minister for culture and tourism Gajendra Singh Shekhawat in a written reply in the Lok Sabha on Monday.

Five core verticals of the mission

The Gyan Bharatam Mission is structured around five key verticals:

• Survey and cataloguing of manuscripts across institutions and private collections
• Conservation and capacity building to strengthen preservation practices
• Technology and digitisation using uniform national standards
• Linguistics and translation to improve accessibility and research use
• Research, publication and outreach to promote academic and public engagement

Nationwide institutional network

The mission mandates the creation of a pan-India network of Cluster Centres (CCs) and Independent Centres (ICs) to implement its objectives at scale.

So far:

• 45 centres have been onboarded to carry out activities across the five verticals
• 20 states and union territories have been designated as nodal coordinating authorities for implementation within their jurisdictions

A detailed list of onboarded centres has been annexed by the ministry.

Progress in digitisation and access

Under the Gyan Bharatam Mission, more than 7.5 lakh manuscripts have already been digitised. Of these, 1.29 lakh manuscripts are currently accessible to the public through the Gyan Bharatam Portal.

The portal serves as a central platform for discovery, access and long-term preservation of digitised manuscript content.

Technical and quality standards

The mission follows stringent technical, preservation and metadata standards to ensure long-term usability and authenticity of digital records.

Key digitisation protocols include:

• Minimum 400 DPI, 24-bit colour scanning (600 DPI where required) using non-destructive, face-up overhead scanners with cold light
• Mandatory image post-processing, including de-skewing, cropping, light equalisation and noise removal, while maintaining colour fidelity
• Manual quality verification of all digitised outputs

File and storage standards include:

• Master files in TIFF v6.0 (LZW compressed)
• Access copies in JPEG and searchable PDF/A with indelible watermark
• Long-term archival using LTO-9 tapes, supported by cloud-based backup and disaster recovery systems

Metadata and AI integration

The mission captures comprehensive metadata across multiple layers:

• Descriptive, structural, technical and administrative metadata
• Information on content, source institution, region, language, script, conservation status, date of creation, file formats, compression methods and object relationships

Metadata is supplied in CSV and XML formats with each digitisation batch to ensure interoperability and global discoverability.

An AI-integrated digital platform and mobile application is being developed to enhance search, classification, translation and user access.

Implementation support and partnerships

To operationalise the mission, technical partners have been onboarded for:

• Metadata creation and integration with the National Digital Repository (NDR)
• Deployment of digitisation equipment across centres
• Development of the AI-enabled platform and mobile app
• Secure cloud-based hosting, backup and cybersecurity
• Long-term archival and disaster recovery using LTO-9 storage

A detailed manual on preservation and conservation has been prepared and shared with conservation experts for feedback, and a dedicated survey application has been developed and circulated among stakeholders.

Preserving civilisational knowledge at scale

Through standardised digitisation, institutional coordination and advanced technology, the Gyan Bharatam Mission represents one of India’s most ambitious efforts to preserve its manuscript legacy. By combining heritage conservation with digital access and research enablement, the mission aims to ensure that India’s ancient knowledge systems remain a living resource for scholars, institutions and future generations.