Gyan Bharatam in J&K: 43,000 manuscripts found, LG Sinha urges translation

Surveys under the Centre's Gyan Bharatam mission have identified 43,000 manuscripts in Jammu and Kashmir, Lieutenant Governor Manoj Sinha said in Srinagar on Thursday, 12 November 2026. Speaking at a two-day national seminar on the "Revival, Preservation and Sustainability of Cultural Heritage of Kashmir", he said digitisation of the manuscripts is progressing steadily, and that about 96.8 lakh pages of archival documents, roughly 68% of those available, have been digitised. He urged universities, teachers and cultural institutions to translate classical texts and promote research on them. Union Culture and Tourism Minister Gajendra Singh Shekhawat joined the seminar online.

Gyan Bharatam is the Union Culture Ministry's national mission to survey, conserve and digitise India's manuscripts, with a stated aim of digitising more than one crore of them. Its surveys go to libraries, institutions and private collections to list handwritten texts that have never been catalogued, so that they can be preserved and made available to scholars.

Finding 43,000 manuscripts is the first step. A manuscript that has been located and listed is not yet safe or readable: it still has to be conserved, photographed or scanned, catalogued, and then studied. That is why Sinha's appeal to universities matters. Without translation and research, a digitised manuscript can still remain unread by all but a few specialists.

The figures also show progress on the wider record. By the Lieutenant Governor's figures, about two-thirds of available archival pages have been digitised, which helps researchers, while about a third remain to be done. On monuments and sites, the conservation numbers show a pipeline: dozens of projects finished, and hundreds more approved.

Sinha also tied heritage to social harmony, saying the culture of every community in Kashmir must be protected with sensitivity, and singling out the contribution of Kashmiri Pandits.

Peepals calculation: If 96.8 lakh pages are about 68% of available archival documents, the total comes to roughly 142 lakh pages (96.8 ÷ 0.68 ≈ 142.4), leaving about 45.6 lakh pages still to be digitised. In heritage conservation, more than 40 of 106 first- and second-phase projects are complete, a little under 40% (40 ÷ 106 ≈ 0.38), while 312 of 321 Phase III projects, about 97%, have approval (312 ÷ 321 ≈ 0.97). Our calculation from the reported figures.

Short-term: The seminar puts manuscripts and translation on the agenda of universities and cultural bodies in Jammu and Kashmir, which the Lieutenant Governor asked to take up research and documentation.

Long-term: If the identified manuscripts are digitised and studied, scholars in India and abroad will be able to read Kashmiri texts that were hidden in private and institutional collections, adding to the record of Indian knowledge traditions.

Who is affected: Scholars of Kashmir's history and literature, universities and libraries in Jammu and Kashmir, families and institutions that hold manuscripts, and students of Indian knowledge systems.

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