New Delhi Declaration adopted to preserve manuscript heritage

A global conference on India’s manuscript heritage concluded on Saturday with the adoption of the New Delhi Declaration, which aims to preserve, digitise and disseminate knowledge contained in manuscripts. The conference, titled ‘Gyan Bharatam’, was held over three days at Vigyan Bhawan in New Delhi.

The declaration recognised manuscripts as “living memory of a nation, and foundation of its civilisational identity”. It resolved that manuscripts should be preserved, repatriated or digitised to ensure access for future generations. The resolution also urged efforts to acquire original manuscripts from across the world or secure their digital copies.

India is home to nearly 10 million manuscripts that reflect its traditional knowledge and cultural heritage. The government has launched the Gyan Bharatam Mission under the Ministry of Culture to document, survey, conserve and digitise this collection. The mission aims to make more than one crore manuscripts from academic institutions, museums, libraries and private collections available to the public.

The declaration called for the manuscript preservation efforts to be turned into a “jan aandolan” or people’s movement, aiming to engage communities and institutions across the country.

“We resolve to preserve, digitise and disseminate this vast treasure. We firmly believe manuscripts are not merely relics of the past, but a guiding light for the future,” the declaration stated.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who inaugurated the conference on Friday, said India has the largest collection of manuscripts in the world and that these works reflect “the footprints of the development of the entire humanity”. 

He highlighted that while many manuscripts have been lost over time, the surviving texts show “how devoted our ancestors were to knowledge, science and learning”.

Modi launched the ‘Gyan Bharatam Portal’, a digital platform aimed at accelerating preservation and access. He underscored the need to regulate intellectual piracy, pointing out that elements of India’s traditional knowledge systems are often copied and patented by others. He encouraged universities and youth to engage with the effort and use technologies like Artificial Intelligence to better understand and share the knowledge.