Gyan Bharatam Mission: The first ever three-day international manuscript heritage conference titled 'Reclaiming India’s Knowledge Legacy Through Manuscript Heritage' commenced today at Vigyan Bhawan in Delhi. The government aims to establish a coalition of stakeholders, institutions, and private manuscript custodians from all over India as part of the ambitious 'Gyan Bharatam' project, which was announced in the 2025-26 budget.
On Friday, Prime Minister Narendra Modi is set to speak at the conference and listen to presentations from various working groups. These groups, made up of experts and officials, have been formed to focus on important topics such as the 'decipherment of ancient scripts: Indus, Gilgit, and Sankha,' as well as exploring 'manuscripts as tools of cultural diplomacy' and the legal and ethical frameworks for the preservation and access of manuscripts.
What is Gyan Bharatam Project?
Gyan Bharatam is a government initiative launched as part of the Union Budget 2025–26 to preserve, digitize, and promote India’s ancient manuscript heritage. It is a restructured and expanded version of the earlier National Mission for Manuscripts (NMM) and functions under the Ministry of Culture as a Central Sector Scheme for the 2024–2031 period.
The mission’s goal is to document and catalogue over one crore (10 million) manuscripts from across India, sourced from libraries, institutions, private collections, and temples. It focuses on scientific conservation, digital archiving, and creating a National Digital Repository that will make these manuscripts accessible to researchers and the public. Gyan Bharatam has been allocated a budget of around Rs 482 crore for a period of six years (2024-2031).
About the Conference
The first-ever international manuscript heritage conference — ‘Reclaiming India’s knowledge legacy through manuscript heritage’ — coincides with the 132nd anniversary of Swami Vivekananda’s historic address at the Parliament of the World’s Religions held in Chicago in 1893.
The three-day event will be attended by around 1,100 participants, including conservation experts, scholars, historians, academics, and custodians of manuscripts across private collections, central and state organisations, universities and libraries.
According to the culture ministry, a critical outcome of the conference will be the adoption of the 'New Delhi Declaration on Manuscript Heritage' at the valedictory session on Saturday where home minister Amit Shah will be the chief guest.
Sharing the vision for Gyan Bharatam, union culture secretary Vivek Aggarwal on Wednesday said that the eventual plan is to create a "hub-and-spoke model" wherein the 'Gyan Bharatam' in New Delhi will be the main hub that will continue to evolve and it will work in collaboration with regional centres across states drawn from among institutions both public and private that have expertise in the field.