VISAKHAPATNAM: Governor Biswa Bhusan Harichandan will launch as many as 2.10 lakh ancient palm leaf manuscripts that were digitised at Andhra University library two years ago on Tuesday, said AU Vice-Chancellor PVGD Prasada Reddy.
According to the V-C, in order to preserve the ancient manuscripts, AU had called for national tenders from the agencies to undertake the digitising of nearly 2.62 lakh ancient palm manuscripts two years ago. However, most of the firms expressed inability to undertake the scanning of the manuscripts, as they were not in a proper format and around 10,000 to 15,000 were damaged. But a Bengaluru firm has come forward to digitise the palm manuscripts, with their latest equipment, they scanned atleast 2.10 lakh manuscripts, even the unconnected letters with rearranging them in a proper manner. The firm gave the manuscripts to the university by adding information that 1,109 writers were included in the works and their families were lived between 1930 to 1935.
The manuscripts are in multiple language, out of which 50 per cent are in Sanskrit, 20,000 to 25,000 in Telugu language, 20,000 in Tamil, 10,000 in Kannada, 10,000 in Malayalam, 10,000 in Bengali and 5,000 in Odiya.
“No efforts were made to know what was the content in the palm-leaf manuscripts. Now the digitised manuscripts will be uploaded to the cloud. He said Governor Biswa Bhusan Harichandan will formally upload the manuscripts at the South Zone Vice-Chancellor conference,” he said.
He said that there is an unprecedented wealth of knowledge in the palm leaf texts and they are a valuable national treasure of India. The digitisation of palm-leaf manuscripts was done as a part of preserving heritage which is also one of the aspects of the National Education Policy.
A special section for the preservation of old palm leaf texts was set up in AU, 90 years ago under the name of the Palm Library Department. Then Bobbili Sansthanam, Arsha Library representative for Visakhapatnam Embar, Imani Venkateshwarlu and others donated palm leaf books to the library.