History, Art & CultureImportant2025-07-15

Initiation of Gyan Bharatam Mission Manuscript Digitisation Drive

Why focus: GS1 Art & Culture. Tests National Mission for Manuscripts and traditional script classifications in How-Many-Correct format.

In News

What Happened

In 2025, the Ministry of Culture launched the Gyan Bharatam Mission to massively digitise and preserve ancient Indian manuscripts. Functioning as the restructured successor to the National Mission for Manuscripts, the drive targets over 1 crore rare manuscripts written on traditional materials like palm leaves, birch bark, and cloth. The initiative will create a universally accessible National Digital Repository of Indian Knowledge Systems.

Why It Matters

This mission is vital for safeguarding India's rich textual traditions from physical degradation and environmental damage. By creating an open, AI-powered digital repository, it ensures that ancient knowledge systems—spanning philosophy, medicine, and astronomy—are permanently protected and made easily accessible to scholars and the global public.

Background

History & Context

The original National Mission for Manuscripts (NMM) was established in February 2003 under the Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts (IGNCA) to survey, document, and conserve India's manuscript heritage. While successful in documenting over 5.2 million texts, it faced funding and technological limitations. In the 2025-26 Union Budget, the government restructured the NMM into the Gyan Bharatam Mission, allocating ₹482.85 crore for the 2024-2031 period to accelerate preservation using modern technology.

What Changed

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Funding and Scale: BEFORE, the NMM operated with limited annual funding (around ₹3.5 crore recently); NOW, the Gyan Bharatam Mission has a drastically increased budget outlay of ₹482.85 crore to systematically digitize over 1 crore manuscripts.
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Technological Integration: BEFORE, digitization relied on basic scanning and manual cataloguing; NOW, the mission utilizes AI-assisted Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR), Optical Character Recognition (OCR), and blockchain technology for provenance tracking and multilingual translation.
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Institutional Framework: BEFORE, preservation was largely centralized or limited to select Manuscript Conservation Centres; NOW, the mission employs a decentralized 'Cluster and Independent Centre' model via new MoUs with dozens of institutions, alongside a grassroots volunteer network called 'Pandulipi Mitras'.

Prelims Angle

NCERT Connection

This event directly connects to Class 11 History Theme 2 (Writing and City Life), which discusses the evolution of early scripts, record-keeping, and ancient writing materials. The Gyan Bharatam Mission is a modern practical application of historical preservation, ensuring that ancient scripts recorded on fragile traditional materials like birch bark and palm leaves are protected through digital archiving.

Practice Questions

Q1

With Reference To

With reference to the Gyan Bharatam Mission, consider the following statements: 1. It is a restructured version of the National Mission for Manuscripts which was originally established in 2003. 2. It aims to create a National Digital Repository using AI-assisted text recognition to digitize ancient knowledge systems. 3. The initiative operates under the nodal authority of the Ministry of Education. Which of the statements given above is/are correct?

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