India has a lot of knowledge and information hidden in scrolls, manuscripts that are unfortunately poorly documented which makes it hard to locate and preserve this knowledge in an organized way. Earlier this year the Ministry of Culture launched the Gyan Bharatam National Manuscript Survey that aims to identify and document these manuscripts located across India. Once the we have a national ‘Manuscript Presence Map’ that shows where these documents are located, what they are about and in what condition they are in the government can then start prioritizing their preservation and digitization based on content, need and condition of the documents.
These will then be available to future researchers and scholars across the world in digital form similar to how various museums and libraries in the world are making their catalogs available digitally globally.
The Gyan Bharatam National Manuscript Survey will be conducted through a four-stage framework:
- The first stage focuses on the identification of manuscripts and their locations through submissions on the digital platform, leading to the creation of a national manuscript presence map.
- The second stage involves physical verification by experts and state authorities.
- The third stage includes detailed cataloguing and metadata creation, such as identification of language, script, and subject.
- The final stage focuses on conservation support and high-quality digitisation of manuscripts to enable long-term preservation and research.
I think that this is a great initiative by the government and having all this information in a central database will allow us to cross-reference across various sources and showcase the rich and extensive history of Indian Knowledge to the future generations. This is especially important because for too long we have been put down by various external (and some internal) so called experts who claim that India was nothing before it was colonized. Where as in reality India was one of the most productive and knowledgeable country in the world till it was systematically looted with our knowledge and past whitewashed to the point where it was almost forgotten.
You can download the app or view the site to help contribute to this effort to preserve our history: App Store download link, Play Store download link and Website.
– Suramya