'Fragile, Rare, Priceless': Modi Govt To Digitise India's Manuscript Heritage

In the next three years, the Narendra Modi-led government will digitise thousands of ancient Indian manuscripts.

According to a government tender from National Archives of India (NAI), many of the manuscripts are “fragile, rare, deteriorating, brittle and to be handled with great care".

For the digitisation project, a sum of Rs 50 crore has already been approved. These priceless records – some written on palm leaf, birch bark, parchment, cloth, or handmade paper – span a vast linguistic spectrum, including Sanskrit, Bengali, Malayalam, Tamil, Telugu, Arabic, and Persian, as per the document accessed by News 18.

Hailed as India’s most ambitious civilisational archiving mission to date, the groundwork for this digital effort was laid much earlier. The culture ministry initiated the process with at least three other websites – Indian Cultures, Abhilekh Patal, and the Indian Mission for Manuscripts.

For years, various government and affiliated institutions quietly collected and preserved neglected manuscripts from temple libraries, scholar households, and oral traditions. In Maharashtra, Odisha, Tamil Nadu, and Kashi, teams collaborated with traditional scholars and researchers to digitise and catalogue regional scriptural records long before it became a priority.

Now, the Centre is formalising this mission. According to the official document, the digitisation project will involve several procedures including unbinding, flattening, cleaning, scanning, quality control, metadata creation, optical character recognition (OCR) for applicable languages, and long-term digital storage.

The tender document notes that the process must adhere to strict conservation standards and be executed by professionals trained in archival handling.

Once fully digitised, the content will be integrated into existing national knowledge systems through platforms such as the National Manuscripts Repository (NAMAMI), the National Virtual Library of India (NVLI), the Digital Library of India, the Bharatavani multilingual platform, and the government’s flagship Indianculture.gov.in portal. These platforms will allow the general public to access and read the documents.

This project is aimed at digitally preserving India’s ancient manuscripts and important documents. The tender also mentions that several manuscripts are in “an extremely fragile condition, susceptible to damage due to age and lack of proper storage", and stressed on the need for non-invasive digitisation using high-resolution scanners that do not expose records to heat or harsh lighting.

Experts involved in the project told News18 that this effort is more than just preservation; it is a cultural reclamation.