The Department-related Parliamentary Standing Committee on Transport, Tourism and Culture headed by Shri Sanjay Kumar Jha, M.P., Rajya Sabha, presented its 393^rd Report on “From Manuscript to Mission: Preserving, Mapping and Sustaining India’s Cultural Heritage in the Age of Artificial Intelligence” on Wednesday, the 12^th August, 2026.

2. The Report was adopted by the Committee on 11^th August, 2026. The Key Recommendations/Observations made by the Committee in this Report are enclosed.

 

The full Report is available on the website of Rajya Sabha https://sansad.in/rs -→Committees→Department related RS→Committee on Transport, Tourism and Culture-→ Report

 

THE THREE HUNDRED NINETY THIRD REPORT OF DEPARTMENT-REL koi ATED PARLIAMENTARY STANDING COMMITTEE ON TRANSPORT, TOURISM AND CULTURE

 

SUMMARY OF RECOMMENDATIONS

1. Enlarge the digitisation standard into a complete capture standard, settled in consultation with scholars, scientists and custodians and in force before the contracts reach full scale: a multispectral recovery tier for damaged and overwritten folios; surface-relief imaging as the standard for palm leaf; a materials record for significant manuscripts; and a dating protocol anchored at Indian accelerator laboratories with margins stated on the record. (Paragraph 5.1.2)

 

2. Institute, with the national scientific departments, a research and challenge programme to read manuscripts that cannot be opened, beginning with a census of fused and fire-damaged holdings. (Paragraph 5.2.2)

 

3. Build the national reading workforce: the Akshar Mitra citizen platform with two independent checks on every page and permanent contributor credit; the university compact under which unedited manuscripts become dissertation editions recognised as research of the first rank; and published priority lists so that effort chases textual value. (Paragraph 5.3.2)

4. Release every publicly funded page and verified transcription as an open national library of training pages with an annual public benchmark, and employ federated learning so that restricted collections contribute without an image leaving custody. (Paragraph 5.4.2)

 

5. Publish the open index of persons, places and works of the corpus, the time-layered atlas of Indian knowledge built upon it, and the register of scribal hands. (Paragraph 5.5.2)

 

6. Extract the astronomical and weather observations of the corpus, with the national scientific agencies, as open national datasets for Indian science. (Paragraph 5.6.2)

 

7. Constitute the standing programme to reunite the scattered corpus: a common catalogue of dispersed and overseas holdings; exchange of images; virtual rebinding by computer matching of leaves and hands; and the identification of Indian manuscripts held overseas, the acquisition of digital copies of them and steps to bring back originals where return can be secured, with reunified treasures proposed for the Memory of the World register. (Paragraph 5.7.2)

 

8. Build, with the Ministry of Ayush, the concordance connecting manuscript formulations to the national terminologies and the statutory pharmacopoeia. (Paragraph 5.8.2)

 

9. Build the Repository's architecture of trust: the international image interoperability framework as the access standard; community access protocols under which every custodian chooses, item by item, what is shown; and an embedded credential in every machine-produced rendering, with the Ministry advocating its preservation with the major platforms. (Paragraph 5.9.2)

 

10. Serve the living inheritance: oral heritage recorded through Indian-language speech recognition, beginning with the fewest surviving bearers; fonts, keyboards and voices for every encoded script, freely downloadable and offered to the major operating systems; and the technique of the last masters recorded in three dimensions, with personal designation, lifetime grant and successor duties. (Paragraph 5.10.2)

 

11. Put the map to work: the cultural and manuscript layers on the PM Gati Shakti National Master Plan and in district planning; knowledge tourism circuits designed from them; and the mapped artisan joined to commerce through the Open Network for Digital Commerce with authenticity credentials linked to the map. (Paragraph 5.11.2)

 

12. Establish the guardianship framework: the machine-graded register of manuscripts at risk with preservation kits and connected loggers for custodians; district salvage annexes wired into the national alerting infrastructure with cultural first-aid training; and a published preservation architecture of distributed copies and a deep archive on century-lasting media. (Paragraph 5.12.2)

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RKK

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