National Mission for Manuscripts

The National Mission for Manuscripts was established to survey and locate manuscripts wherever they may be found in India. The Mission was initiated in February 2003, by the Ministry of Tourism and Culture,Government of India. I ndira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts (IGNCA) is the nodal agency for the execution of this project.

The manuscripts, among the oldest and most extensive in the world, were spread

across the country. However, most of them were in a state of decay and damage.By the end of 2008, it hoped to cover all the States to scan manuscripts in the public and private domains, she said.

The University of Madras was collaborating with the NMM in digitisation of records. Releasing the `Catalogus Catalogorum,' CD, S.P. Thyagarajan, Vice-Chancellor, University of Madras, said his interest in manuscripts was connected with his research in jaundice. The occurrence of liver cancer and cirrhosis was related to Hepatitis B virus, which led him to manuscripts for references to the `keezhanalli' leaf, which is used as a medicine.

Indian manuscripts can soon be accessed worldwide in digital form. The National Mission for Manuscripts, Ministry of Culture, plans to release online database of one million manuscripts in its first web edition by October 2006.

Quoting Mission Director Sudha Gopalakrishnan, S. Raghavan, Senior Faculty in Electronics and Communication Engineering, National Institute of Technology - Tiruchi (NIT-T), said the digitised contents of the manuscripts could be browsed at `www.namami.org'.

`Manus Granthavali', the software used by the Mission for digitising palm manuscripts, is globally accepted. To preserve the original state of the document, a non-touch device is adopted for the screening purpose employing a Flat Bed scanner.

For arriving at the image quality, Bi-tonal scanning is used to represent black and white and colour scanning with multiple bits per pixel reflects the true colour.

Image enhancement processes are then adopted for images that cannot be perceived by human eye. Loss-less compression technique is followed with JPEG/JPEG 2000 international standards.

A participant of the National Seminar on `Exploring the Manuscript Traditions' conducted by Mission and co-ordinated by the Saraswathi Mahal Library (SML), Thanjavur, last week,

Dr. Raghavan, who had earlier served as overall coordinator of Libraries at NIT-T, said conserving and digitising the divergent aspects of manuscripts, ranging from conservation methodologies, medicine, cultural inheritance, Buddhist literature and various knowledge systems, will be of immense use to the heritage lovers and researchers.

The SML alone, he said, has world-renowned manuscripts numbering 60,000 and about 26,000 rare palm manuscripts preserved with herbal technique by P. Perumal, an expert.

The palm manuscripts, in Granth, Devanagri, Telugu, Kannada, Malayalam and Nandinagari scripts, cover all branches of arts, science and Engineering.