Over 7.5 lakh manuscripts digitised under Gyan Bharatam; J&K centres part of national heritage push
New Delhi, Feb 2: More than 7.5 lakh ancient manuscripts have been digitised under Gyan Bharatam, a flagship cultural initiative launched by the Union government to preserve India’s manuscript heritage, with institutions in Jammu and Kashmir among those playing a key role, the government informed Parliament on Monday. Union Minister for Culture and Tourism Gajendra Singh Shekhawat, in a written reply in the Lok Sabha, said 1.29 lakh manuscripts are already accessible to the public through the Gyan Bharatam digital portal. The initiative, announced in the Union Budget 2025–26, has been allocated Rs 491.66 crore for implementation between 2025 and 2031. Aligned with the vision of Viksit Bharat 2047, Gyan Bharatam aims to safeguard, digitise and promote India’s vast repository of manuscripts while integrating cultural preservation with education, research, and technology. As part of the programme, a nationwide network of Cluster Centres and Independent Centres is being established. In Jammu and Kashmir, the Department of Persian at the University of Kashmir, Srinagar, and Shasvat Art Gallery, Jammu, have been onboarded as Cluster Centres to support manuscript conservation, digitisation and research.
The initiative operates across five major focus areas: survey and cataloguing, conservation and capacity building, technology and digitisation, linguistics and translation, and research, publication and outreach.
The minister said strict technical standards are being followed to ensure long-term preservation and global accessibility, including high-resolution non-destructive scanning, detailed metadata documentation, and secure long-term digital storage with disaster recovery mechanisms. An AI-enabled digital platform and mobile application are also being developed. So far, 45 centres across the country have been onboarded to carry out work under the initiative, while 20 States and Union Territories are acting as nodal authorities to coordinate implementation at the regional level. Technical partners have also been engaged for digitisation, metadata creation, cloud storage and integration with the National Digital Repository, enabling wider national and international access. The government said Gyan Bharatam is expected to play a crucial role in preserving India’s civilisational knowledge systems and making them available to scholars, students and the public in digital form.
