Telangana is racing to digitise manuscripts but speed raises questions

The state archives is working under a Union government mission to scan over 1 crore manuscripts by year-end.

Hyderabad: The Telangana State Archives and Research Institute (TSRAI) is creating metadata for 2,000 to 2,500 manuscripts every single day. Survey teams are fanning out to universities, academies and the homes of private collectors across the state, as a June-end deadline looms.

The institute is functioning as a cluster centre under the Gyan Bharatam Mission (GBM), a Union Ministry of Culture initiative. It has set itself a huge goal – survey, conserve and digitise over one crore manuscripts from across India in the first year alone. 

Apart from managing its own collection of 1.8 lakh documents, TSRAI is also handling manuscripts from outside institutions and private individuals, deploying survey teams to locate and preserve collections using herbal conservation methods.

The task at hand

The GBM operates across five verticals of survey and cataloguing, conservation and capacity building, technology and digitisation, linguistics and translation, and research, publication and outreach. It was announced in the Union Budget 2025-26, aligned with the Viksit Bharat 2047 vision. The Parliamentary Standing Finance Committee has sanctioned Rs 491.66 crore for the project from 2025 to 2031.

The pitch to private collectors is careful. Experts visit free of cost. The physical manuscript stays with the owner, as the state only keeps the digital copy.

“If someone has a good collection of manuscripts, a scanner will also be sent to his or her place,” MA Raqeeb, assistant director at TSRAI, told Deccan Chronicle. “Experts will handle it with care throughout the procedure and also help in preservation. We need only the digital version, while the physical manuscript will remain with the owner,” he added.

Surveys have already been conducted at the Sanskrit Academy, the Dr Ambedkar Library at Osmania University, Telugu University and the Iqbal Academy in Masab Tank, among other locations, DC reported.

A big repository 

Over 1.3 lakh digitised manuscripts are already available on the Gyan Bharatam portal. Dr Zareena Parveen, director of the State Archives and the GBM cluster coordinator, described the broader ambition. “The programme aims to survey, document, conserve, and digitise over one crore manuscripts from across the country. It also seeks to create a National Digital Repository of Indian Knowledge Systems,” she told DC.

Whether the repository will prioritise accessibility for researchers, regional communities or a particular vision of national heritage is a question the mission’s documents do not fully answer.

What is clear is that the pace is being pushed. “We have increased the pace of scanning the manuscripts. Most of the digitisation process has already been completed for manuscripts at our institute,” an official told DC.

Looming deadline

TSRAI signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) with the Union ministry in October last year and has until June-end to complete its portion of the exercise, a timeline for work that archivists typically describe as painstaking.

The use of herbal conservation methods, cited by officials, reflects a sensitivity to the fragility of the materials involved. But the sheer scale of what is being attempted and the speed at which it is being done has, in the past, drawn scrutiny in similar digitisation drives elsewhere in the country, where quality control and long-term access have proved harder to sustain than the initial scanning numbers suggested.

For now, the portal keeps filling up.