NEW DELHI — On Friday night, Prime Minister Narendra Modi opened the Gyan Bharatam portal, a groundbreaking digital project that aims to protect and make India’s rich textual legacy available to everyone. The Union Culture Ministry put on the three-day International Conference on Gyan Bharatam, which had the topic “Reclaiming India’s Knowledge Legacy through Manuscript Heritage.” The launch was the main event.
The Gyan Bharatam portal is a specialized online space for making India’s old manuscripts easier to digitize, protect, and make available to the public. This program is an important step in making it simpler for scholars, researchers, and the general public to access the country’s traditional knowledge while also protecting these delicate and priceless records for the long term.
Today, on Shravan Poornima, we mark World Sanskrit Day. Sanskrit is a timeless source of knowledge and expression. Its impact can be found across sectors. This day is an occasion to appreciate the effort of every person around the world who is learning and popularising Sanskrit.
— Narendra Modi (@narendramodi) August 9, 2025
The International Conference on Gyan Bharatam, which takes place from September 11 to 13, has brought together top specialists from several sectors, such as scholars, environmentalists, technologists, and policymakers. The event’s purpose is to come up with a plan for how to bring India’s manuscript treasure back to life and make it a major part of a global conversation about knowledge. There is also an exhibition of rare manuscripts and scholarly talks on a wide range of topics, such as how to protect heritage, how to use technology like Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) to read old scripts, and how to use these technologies to protect heritage.
Prime Minister Modi hinted at the government’s ambitions for this mission on World Sanskrit Day (August 9) of this year. He wrote on X (formerly Twitter) about the government’s efforts over the past ten years to make Sanskrit more popular. He said, “These include setting up Central Sanskrit Universities, Sanskrit Learning Centres, providing grants to Sanskrit scholars, and the Gyan Bharatam Mission to digitise manuscripts.” Many students and scholars have benefited from this.
What the Gyan Bharatam Mission is all about
The Gyan Bharatam Mission is a big nationwide movement with many parts that work together:
Preservation and Digitization: It will find, categorize, and protect rare texts through a network of Manuscript Resource and Conservation Centers. AI and HTR technology will be used to digitize a lot of things, which will make a national digital repository available to people all over the world.
Building Capacity: The goal will focus on teaching researchers how to transcribe and read ancient texts, as well as making technology tools like mobile apps and secure cloud storage.
Global Collaboration: The goal of the effort is to encourage people to work together to get manuscripts that are now held abroad and to make documentation more consistent.
Public and Youth Engagement: Programs will be made to encourage manuscript owners to share their collections and get young scholars involved through exhibitions, digital laboratories, and heritage museums. The government also wants to combine old knowledge with new knowledge in schools so that the information in these texts stays alive.
The Gyan Bharatam portal is a big step toward making India’s unique intellectual history a living and available resource for the whole globe.