Visva-Bharati starts digitising Lipika manuscripts under Gyan Bharatam mission

Visva-Bharati University in Santiniketan, West Bengal, has begun digitising the rare manuscripts held in its Lipika Manuscriptorium, known locally as Lipika Puthisala, under the Centre's Gyan Bharatam mission for manuscript heritage. The work, reported on Wednesday, 4 November 2026, started soon after the Puja holidays, according to the university. Its spokesperson, Atig Ghosh, and Professor Sisir Sahana, who is in charge of the manuscriptorium and is also Principal of Kala Bhavana, informed the Union Education Minister and Minister of State Sukanta Majumdar of the start. The upgrade comes at no financial cost to the university, according to reports of the announcement.

Handwritten manuscripts carry a large part of India's older learning, and they are fragile objects. Every time an original is handled, it wears a little more, and a damaged page cannot be replaced. That is why manuscript libraries limit access, and why many texts are studied by only a few specialists who can travel to see them.

Digitisation does two things at once. It creates a high-quality image that can be studied without touching the original, so the physical object is handled less and lasts longer. And it lets a researcher in another city, or another country, read a text that once required a trip to Santiniketan and permission to enter a reading room. For students of Indian knowledge systems, that changes what can be studied and by whom.

Gyan Bharatam is the government's attempt to do this at national scale. It grew out of the earlier National Mission for Manuscripts and, according to official descriptions, aims to survey, document, conserve and digitise more than one crore manuscripts across the country and build a National Digital Repository of Indian Knowledge Systems. The mission works through partner institutions; a Ministry of Culture briefing spoke of 25 clusters, 20 regional centres and ten centres of excellence. Visva-Bharati's move brings the Lipika collection into that national effort.

Peepals timeline: Gyan Bharatam took over from the National Mission for Manuscripts and was given its public launch at an international manuscript conference in New Delhi in September 2025, where a Gyan Bharatam portal was to be launched by the Prime Minister. Through 2026, state governments and institutions have joined, with Uttar Pradesh announcing a district-level manuscript digitisation drive under the mission in February 2026. On 4 November 2026, Visva-Bharati reported that digitisation of its Lipika collection had begun.

Short-term: Scanning and cataloguing will go on alongside the manuscriptorium's normal use. The university has not said when the digital copies will be available or whether they will be open to the public, so researchers will need to wait for those details.

Long-term: Once the images and catalogue records are complete, the collection can be linked to the national repository, making its texts searchable alongside those of other libraries. A digital copy also protects the content if the original is damaged.

Who is affected: researchers and students of Indian languages, history, philosophy and the arts; Visva-Bharati's own departments; and libraries and families who hold manuscripts and are watching how the national mission works in practice.

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