France to preserve India’s manuscript heritage

India and France signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) in Paris to strengthen institutional cooperation in the preservation, digitisation, research and dissemination of manuscript and documentary heritage. The MoU was signed betwwen the  Indian Ministry of Culture and the Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF), or National Library of France, on 26 October 2026.The MoU was signed and exchanged under the Gyan Bharatam Mission, by Vivek Aggarwal, Secretary, Ministry of Culture and Gilles Pécout, President of BnF.
The partnership brings together the Ministry of Culture, through Gyan Bharatam, the National Archives of India, New Delhi, the National Library, Kolkata, and BnF. It establishes a framework for cooperation across five key areas: digitisation; cross-sharing on the National Digital Repository; technology exchange; conservation; and research and development.
The Ministry of Culture and BnF will work to identify and digitise Indic-origin manuscripts and collections held by BnF. The MoU also provides for the exchange of expertise and knowledge in digitisation and preservation technologies, cataloguing standards, Optical Character Recognition (OCR) and Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR) tools for Indian scripts, digital humanities and manuscript conservation. The partnership also envisages joint workshops, capacity-building programmes, research initiatives, publications, exhibitions, and exchanges of scholars and experts.
Gyan Bharatam Mission is the Ministry of Culture’s flagship initiative dedicated to the identification, documentation, conservation, digitisation, translation, research and dissemination of India’s manuscript heritage. Its National Digital Repository is envisaged as a secure digital repository for Indian-origin manuscripts and Indian Knowledge Systems held in India and across the world. It will enable structured, permission-based access for research and study, according to a press release by the Ministry of Culture.