New Delhi: Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Friday launched the 'Gyan Bharatam' portal, a dedicated digital repository that seeks to accelerate digitisation and preservation of ancient Indian manuscripts and enhance the dissemination of traditional knowledge embedded in them.

Modi was attending an international conference on India's manuscript heritage at Vigyan Bhawan here, themed “Reclaiming India's Knowledge Legacy through Manuscript Heritage.” The portal has been envisaged as a digital gateway to India's ancient wisdom.

At the Plenary Hall, presentations were made by working groups constituted under the Gyan Bharatam Mission in the presence of the prime minister. A total of eight groups have been set up under different verticals, including manuscript conservation, digitisation technologies, metadata standards, legal frameworks, cultural diplomacy and decipherment of ancient scripts.

The conference, hosted by the Ministry of Culture from September 11-13, comes under the government's Gyan Bharatam Mission — a major initiative to survey, document, conserve, digitise and make accessible more than one crore manuscripts located at academic institutions, museums, libraries and private collections across India.

The event brings together scholars, conservationists, technologists and policy experts to deliberate on ways to revitalise India's manuscript wealth and place it at the heart of global knowledge dialogue.

India has one of the world's richest collections of manuscripts, with nearly 10 million texts that embody traditional knowledge and cultural heritage.