Centre launches nationwide survey to map India’s manuscript heritage under Gyan Bharatam Mission

In a first-of-its-kind initiative, the ministry of culture will begin a three-month nationwide survey from Monday to map India’s vast manuscript heritage and create a comprehensive digital record of these historical treasures, Times of India reported.

The exercise will be carried out across the country, beginning at the district level, with teams tasked with identifying manuscripts held in institutions, private collections and with individual custodians. The aim is to compile a consolidated database and build a national digital repository on the central portal of the Gyan Bharatam Mission.

As part of the effort, manuscripts discovered during the survey will also be geotagged to help authorities plan their conservation, preservation and digitisation.


Culture secretary Vivek Aggarwal said survey teams would use the Gyan Bharatam mobile application to upload information in real time.

“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,” he said.

The survey aligns with the vision outlined in the New Delhi Declaration, adopted in September last year at the Gyan Bharatam Conference held at Vigyan Bhawan.

At the event, Prime Minister Narendra Modi described the mission as the “proclamation of India's culture, literature and consciousness”.

Modi had also noted that India possesses the world’s largest collection of manuscripts — estimated at about one crore — and said their digitisation under the Gyan Bharatam Mission, announced in the Union Budget for 2025–26, would help curb “intellectual piracy”.

Aggarwal said committees had already been set up at the state and district levels to oversee the exercise, chaired by the respective chief secretaries and district magistrates.

The ministry is also working on integrating manuscripts that have already been digitised by institutions and state governments into the central platform. These existing digital collections are estimated to exceed one million manuscripts.