India, France's national library sign pact to digitise Indic manuscripts in Paris

India's Ministry of Culture and the Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF), France's national library, signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) in Paris on Monday, October 26, 2026, to work together on preserving India's manuscript heritage. The agreement was signed under the Gyan Bharatam Mission, the ministry's programme to document and digitise India's manuscripts. It was signed by Vivek Aggarwal, Secretary of the Ministry of Culture, and Gilles Pécout, President of the BnF. A key aim is to identify and digitise manuscripts and collections of Indian origin held in the French library.

Part of India's written heritage is not in India. Over past centuries, many manuscripts made their way to Europe, where they now sit in national libraries and universities; the MoU itself is built on the BnF holding Indian-origin collections. For Indian scholars, studying these works has usually meant travelling abroad or relying on old, partial copies.

Digitisation changes that. Once a manuscript is scanned at high quality and catalogued, a student in Varanasi or Thiruvananthapuram can study it on a screen, alongside other copies of the same text held in India. Comparing copies is the basic method of textual scholarship: scribes made errors and changes, and the oldest or most reliable reading can only be found by setting many copies side by side. Bringing foreign-held copies into India's National Digital Repository would give scholars far more material to compare.

The technical side of the agreement matters as much as the scans. OCR (optical character recognition) and HTR (handwritten text recognition) are software tools that turn an image of writing into searchable text. They work well for printed English, but handwritten manuscripts in Indian scripts, often old, faded and in varied styles, are far harder. Sharing tools and methods between the two institutions could speed up work on that problem, which affects millions of manuscripts in India itself.

Gyan Bharatam was announced in the Union Budget for 2025-26 with the goal of documenting and conserving about one crore manuscripts. Agreements with foreign libraries extend the mission's reach beyond India's borders.

Short-term: The MoU sets up a framework; it does not by itself put any manuscript online. The two institutions will first need to list the Indic material at the BnF and agree on what to digitise first. Details such as the number of items, timelines and costs have not been made public.

Long-term: If the work proceeds, Indian researchers, students and teachers could gain free or easy access to texts that have been hard to reach for generations, and India's manuscript-reading software could improve through the shared research.

Who is affected: Scholars of Sanskrit, Indian philosophy, history and the sciences; universities and libraries; the National Archives and National Library; and anyone interested in India's textual traditions.

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