Context: The Union Budget 2025-26 announced a special mission for the survey, documentation, and conservation of India’s manuscript heritage, launched as the ‘Gyan Bharatam Mission’.
Relevance of the Topic: Prelims: Key facts about ‘Gyan Bharatam Mission’.
Gyan Bharatam Mission
- Nodal Ministry: Ministry of Culture
- Objective: To focus on the survey, documentation and conservation of India’s manuscript heritage.
- Coverage: To cover more than one crore manuscripts held by academic institutions, museums, libraries, and private collectors.
- A National Digital Repository of Indian knowledge systems for knowledge sharing will be set up.
- The mission will be executed under National Mission for Manuscripts (NMM), which was launched in 2003.
- Budget allocation for the NMM has been increased from ₹3.5 crore to ₹60 crore.
National Mission for Manuscripts (NMM)
- Nodal Ministry: Ministry of Culture
- Establishment: 2003.
- The Mission has the mandate of identifying, documenting, conserving and making accessible the manuscript heritage of India.
- Objectives:
- Locate manuscripts through national level Survey and Post-Survey.
- Document each and every manuscript and manuscript repository, for a National Electronic Database.
- Conserve manuscripts incorporating both modern and indigenous methods of conservation and training a new generation of manuscript conservators.
- To train the next generation of scholars in various aspects of Manuscript Studies.
- To promote access to manuscripts by digitizing the rarest and most endangered manuscripts.
- To promote access to manuscripts through publication of critical editions of unpublished manuscripts and catalogues.
- To facilitate the public's engagement with manuscripts through lectures, seminars, publications and other outreach programmes.
- The National Mission for Manuscripts presently functions as a unit under the Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts (IGNCA).
- The NMM uses technology for preservation and digitization of manuscripts.
- The digitized manuscripts are uploaded to an online portal (https://www.pandulipipatala.nic.in)
- Methodologies for preservation: Lamination, restoration, and deacidification of manuscripts.
Challenges before the Mission:
- Manuscript wealth of India is estimated at around ten million manuscripts and is perhaps the largest collection in the world. Manuscripts are found in a vast number of languages and scripts many of which can no longer be read.
- Manuscripts are found in different kinds of repositories - ranging from museums, institutions of learning to private homes and houses of worship, big and small.
- Manuscripts are often found to have been neglected for decades and in very poor physical state - insect ridden, fungus infected or brittle, fading and fragile.
- Scholars who can study and use manuscripts are fast disappearing and a new generation of scholars is not able to rise to the challenge.
- Often, the knowledge in manuscripts is not seen as relevant to our times, thus neglected.
Manuscript
- A manuscript is a handwritten composition on paper, bark, cloth, metal, palm leaf or any other material dating back at least seventy-five years that has significant scientific, historical or aesthetic value.
- These writings deal with a wide range of subjects like Veda, Vedanta, Darshan, Ayurveda, Aesthetic, Astronomy, Astrology, Yoga, Vaastu, Mathematics, Linguistics etc.
- Lithographs (drawing on a flat surface i.e. stone/metal and then transferring the image to paper) and printed volumes are not manuscripts.
- Manuscripts are found in hundreds of different languages and scripts.
- 70% of manuscripts are in the Sanskrit language.
- Other 30% of manuscripts are in languages like Assamese, Bengali, Dogri, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Kashmiri, Konkani, Maithili, Malayalam, Meithei /Manipuri, Marathi, Nepali, Newari/ Nepal Bhasa, Odia, Punjabi, Tamil, Telugu, Urdu, Chakma etc.
- Manuscripts are distinct from historical records such as epigraphs on rocks, firmans, revenue records which provide direct information on events or processes in history. Manuscripts have knowledge content.