Paper manuscripts at the Oriental Research Institute that are to be digitised with the assistance of National Mission for Manuscripts. | Photo Credit: M.A. SRIRAM

Prime Minister Narendra Modi will launch the revamped National Manuscripts Mission, which was announced in the Union Budget earlier this year, on June 9.

The ‘Gyan Bharatam Mission’, which is expected to cover more than one crore manuscripts, would be responsible for the survey, documentation and conservation of India’s manuscript heritage lying with academic institutions, museums, libraries and private collectors.

To accommodate this new initiative, the Union Budget had hiked the budgetary allocation for the existing National Manuscripts Mission (NMM) from ₹3.5 crore to ₹60 crore.

Sources told The Hindu that a series of meetings, helmed by the Union Culture Secretary, have taken place to finalise the contours of the new organisation being set up and it is expected to be launched on June 9 by the Prime Minister.

The Hindu had reported in October last that the Union Ministry of Culture was set to “revive and relaunch” the NMM and was mulling the formation of an autonomous body to help preserve ancient texts in India.

Presently, NMM is a part of the Indira Gandhi National Centre for Arts. It was set up in 2003, but had not taken off as expected.

The Culture Ministry had organised a meeting first on October 14, 2024, to discuss the way forward. The meeting chaired by Culture Minister Gajendra Singh Shekhawat, was attended by some notable experts in the field like former Chairperson of Central Institute of Indian Languages (CIIL), Mysore and well-known linguist Udaya Narayana Singh, Prof. K. Ramasubramanian of IIT Bombay, Dr. M.A. Alwar of Samskriti Foundation, Dr. Sudha Gopalakrishnan, Founder Director of NMM; Chamu Krishna Shastry, Chairman of Bhartiya Bhasha Samiti and Shrinivasa Varakhedi, Vice-Chancellor of Central Sanskrit University, Delhi. The expert group also included a programme manager from Google Arts and Culture.

According to sources, the NMM has till date, prepared a metadata of 52 lakh manuscripts and roughly over three lakh titles have been digitised. However, only one-third of them have been uploaded.

A senior official from the NMM said out of the nearly 1.30 lakh manuscripts uploaded, only 70,000 were available for viewing. The reason for this was that there was no “access policy”, which means there is no incentive for private owners to make manuscripts available with them be viewed.

Around 80% of manuscripts in India are with private parties.

The NMM has also informed that over the last 21 years, they have undertaken preventive and curative conservation of nine crore folios.