PM Modi Unveils ₹483 Crore ‘Gyan Bharatam Mission’ to Digitise Over 1 Crore Ancient Manuscripts by 2031.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi formally inaugurated the Gyan Bharatam Mission on June 9, 2025, a restructured and expanded version of the National Manuscripts Mission. The initiative, under the Ministry of Culture, aims to digitise and conserve over one crore manuscripts, creating a global-accessible National Digital Repository by 2031.

      - The Gyan Bharatam Mission replaces the earlier National Mission for Manuscripts (NMM), initially launched in 2003 by the Ministry of Culture through the Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts (IGNCA). The revamped mission was announced during the Union Budget 2025‑26, and its official launch ceremony took place on June 9, 2025, with PM Modi presiding. Its objective is to survey, document, conserve, and digitise more than ten million (one crore) manuscripts held across libraries, universities, museums, and private collections.

      - In a major funding shift, the annual budget for manuscript preservation was escalated from ₹3.5 crore to ₹60 crore—a nearly seventeen‑fold increase—as part of a larger ₹482.85 crore Central Sector Scheme covering 2024‑2031. This financing — overseen by the Ministry of Culture — will support a wide array of mission components: surveys, conservation, digitisation, research publications, capacity building, and outreach activities.

      - The mission aims to digitise and preserve manuscripts through nationwide surveys, scientific conservation, and building a National Digital Manuscripts Library. Key efforts include training in manuscriptology and translation, with centres like Sampurnanand Sanskrit University in Varanasi leading preservation initiatives.

Main Point :-   (i) As of 2025, metadata for roughly 52 lakh manuscripts has been prepared, with around 3 lakh manuscripts digitised and approximately 1.35 lakh uploaded online, of which only 76,000 are freely accessible to the public. In the next five years, the mission aims to significantly expand both digitisation and public access, emphasising rare and fragile manuscripts. Over time, more manuscripts—including those in private collections, estimated to hold about 80% of India’s manuscript wealth—will be brought into the repository through access-sharing policies.

      (ii) The mission includes collaborative partnerships with universities, research centres, private collectors, and international platforms such as Google Arts & Culture. In expert consultation meetings chaired by Union Culture Minister Gajendra Singh Shekhawat, scholars including Udaya Narayana Singh, K. Ramasubramanian, and Sudha Gopalakrishnan helped shape policy frameworks, metadata standards, and digitisation protocols. The revamped structure envisages an autonomous institutional mechanism replacing the earlier IGNCA sub‑structure for better efficiency.

(iii) A Three-Day International Conference will be held in New Delhi from September 11–13, 2025, marking Swami Vivekananda’s 1893 address. It will gather 500 delegates for sessions on AI-based script recognition, conservation, and paleography, showcasing startups and innovations in manuscript preservation—blending ancient Indian knowledge with modern scholarship and diplomacy.