NEW DELHI: With 1.16 crore manuscripts already verified and recorded in the national database within a year of the launch of the ambitious Gyan Bharatam Mission, a parliamentary panel has pitched for a dedicated scientific programme to recover manuscripts that cannot be physically opened, recommending the creation of a nationwide pool of researchers and citizen contributors to read and transcribe India’s vast manuscript heritage.
In its report titled “From Manuscript to Mission: Preserving, Mapping and Sustaining India’s Cultural Heritage in the Age of Artificial Intelligence” submitted in Parliament in the recently concluded Monsoon session, the 31-member standing Committee on Transport, Tourism and Culture also suggested expansion of the existing national digitisation standard into a comprehensive capture standard. The committee said that the standard should be finalised in consultation with manuscript scholars, scientific institutions and representatives of custodian communities, and brought into force before mass digitisation contracts reach full scale.
“The committee recommends that the ministry institute, with the national scientific departments whose scanning facilities already exist, a research and challenge programme for the reading of manuscripts that cannot be opened, beginning with a national census of fused and fire-damaged holdings identified in the survey, and conducted as a public challenge open to India's researchers and students, on the pattern the Mission has already used with success for script recognition,” read the report in which parliamentarians have made 12 recommendations for comprehensive overhaul of the Mission.
The Panel headed by Rajya Sabha MP of Janata Dal (United) Sanjay Kumar Jha further proposed to set up “national reading workforce” comprising a citizen transcription platform and a standing compact with universities.
It also suggested that the citizen transcription platform might be named “Akshar Mitra”. Under the proposed system, every machine-read manuscript page would be independently checked by two volunteers, with differences resolved by a third contributor or a scholar. The second limb of the proposed workforce would be built through a standing compact with universities. Under this arrangement, university departments would adopt unedited manuscripts as dissertation projects and produce critical editions according to international scholarly standards.
For the survey, documentation and conservation of manuscript heritage of the country, the Mission was announced in the Union Budget 2025-26. It has been sanctioned an outlay of Rs 491.66 crore for the period 2025-2031. Prime Minister Narendra Modi subsequently launched the Gyan Bharatam portal under the Ministry of Culture in September 2025, with a resolve to acquire and repatriate original manuscripts or to secure their digital copies from abroad.
A national manuscript survey conducted between March and June 2026 have drawn entries for 2.25 crore manuscripts, of which 1.16 crore have already been verified and entered into the national database, each geographically tagged. About eight lakh manuscripts have been digitised.
Key recommendations:
• Enlarge the digitisation standard into a complete capture standard in consultation with scholars, scientists and custodian
• Multispectral recovery tier for damaged and overwritten folios
• Institute a research and challenge programme to read manuscripts that cannot be opened
• Akshar Mitra citizen platform with two independent checks on every page and permanent contributor credit
• University compact under which unedited manuscripts become dissertation editions recognised as research of the first rank
• Release every publicly funded page and verified transcription as an open national library of training pages with an annual public benchmark
• Constitute the standing programme to reunite the scattered corpus: a common catalogue of dispersed and overseas holdings
• Build, with the Ministry of Ayush, the concordance connecting manuscript formulations to the national terminologies and the statutory pharmacopoeia
