india

Updated: Sep 24, 2019 08:17 IST

The National Mission for manuscripts has digitised over 3.06 crore pages of three lakh manuscripts till August this year.

This includes 2,99,50,000 pages in June, 3,03,50,000 pages in July and 3,06,65,000 pages in August as per sources from the ministry of culture. In addition to that, the Mission has also catalogued 43,41,677 manuscripts till August this year.

Some of these manuscripts are from the Bhubaneshwar’s Orissa State Museum, Lucknow’s Jain Manuscripts, Kashmir’s Allama Iqbal Library, Guwahati’s Shankardeva Kalakshetra, Pondicherry’s French Institute of Pondicherry, Delhi’s Jamia Hamdard, Patna Museum, and Kurukshetra University, among others.

These pages are now part of the Digital Manuscripts Library of India, a searchable collection set up to allow for easy access to manuscripts, predominantly in Indian languages. Under the Mission, manuscripts of science, arts, culture, music, traditional medicine, vedas, tantras and other disciplines will be easily accessible to everyone.

The Mission has also developed an app and software under which meta-data can be entered online to be uploaded in the cloud server along with digital images which will be interlinked.

The Mission, which was initiated in 2003 with an intent to locate, document, conserve and disseminate knowledge about India’s manuscripts, had started with the digitisation of 5 caches of manuscripts. These manuscripts, some of which are rare ones, cover a variety of themes, textures and aesthetics, scripts, languages, calligraphies, illuminations and illustrations.