
Gyan Bharatam: Building a Digital Knowledge Infrastructure for India’s Manuscript Heritage
India possesses a vast and diverse manuscript heritage covering fields such as philosophy, literature, medicine, mathematics, astronomy, arts, governance and other knowledge traditions. These manuscripts are dispersed across libraries, academic institutions, museums, temples, monasteries, private collections and individual custodians, making their systematic identification, preservation and accessibility a major institutional challenge. Government sources have estimated India's manuscript corpus in the range of 5–10 million manuscripts, highlighting the scale of the task involved in creating a comprehensive national inventory (Ministry of Culture, 2026).






