Revitalizing India National Mission for Manuscripts

The National Mission for Manuscripts (NMM) in India is being revitalized by the Union Ministry of Culture. The goal of this project is to save old manuscripts and literature. To strengthen these initiatives, a new independent organization is suggested, most likely to be called the National Manuscripts Authority. At the moment, the Indira Gandhi National Centre for Arts is the organization that runs the NMM.

Meeting Overview: In consequence, a new vocational dimension of the National Manuscripts Museum (NMM)

• The said meeting was presided over by the minister of Culture, Gajendra Singh Shekhawat, and all those in attendance were experts from different fields.
• Metadata has been collected for manuscript 5,200,000, and more than 300,000 titles are already digitized in the NMM.
• Some of the challenges mentioned are as follows: (i) Contradictory metadata when manuscripts are digitized, (ii) Only about 70,000 manuscripts available for viewing out of about 130,000 manuscripts uploaded.
• Approximately eight out of ten manuscripts are owned by private individuals in India, making them difficult to preserve.
• In the last 21 years of its existence, the NMM has conserved 90 million folios of text, the preservation of which is its main objective.
• A future prospectus for the NMM involves the creation of academic chairs in other universities, raising the international profile of India’s manuscript traditions, as well as legal and IPR.
• The reconstitution of the NMM and the setting up of the National Manuscripts Authority are signs of emerging fresh interest in conserving ancient Indian texts.