About
To survey, locate, document, conserve, digitise and make accessible India's manuscript heritage, estimated at 10 million manuscripts in over 100 languages.
The National Mission for Manuscripts (NMM), also known by the acronym NAMAMI, is an autonomous organisation under the Ministry of Culture, Government of India. Established on 7 February 2003, it is hosted at the Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts (IGNCA), 11 Mansingh Road, New Delhi, which serves as its nodal agency. The Mission's mandate is to survey, locate, document, conserve, digitise and make accessible India's manuscript heritage. India is estimated to hold approximately 10 million manuscripts in over 24 scripts and 100 languages, covering disciplines from philosophy and astronomy to medicine, music, and the performing arts. NMM has created a national network of Manuscript Resource Centres (MRCs), Manuscript Conservation Centres (MCCs), Manuscript Partner Centres (MPCs) and Manuscript Conservation Partner Centres (MCPCs) spread across the country. Its digital repository, Kritisampada (formerly Bharatiya Kriti Sampada), provides online access to digitised manuscript catalogues.
The origins of the National Mission for Manuscripts lie in a recognition of an urgent and large-scale conservation problem. India's manuscript wealth spans texts written on palm leaf, birch bark, cloth, paper, and metal, in dozens of scripts, across centuries. By the early 2000s, it was clear that while significant collections existed in institutions, temples, monasteries, and private homes, systematic documentation was absent and deterioration was rampant.
The Mission was announced by Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee in his Independence Day address from the Red Fort in 2002, and formally launched on 7 February 2003 with an initial outlay of Rs. 35 crore. The Ministry of Culture designated IGNCA as the nodal agency. In its early conception, three imperatives were identified: since 70 per cent of manuscripts are in Sanskrit, the promotion of Sanskrit learning would be essential; existing institutions working in the field would need to be networked; and a broad public awareness campaign would be necessary to encourage individual custodians to register their holdings.
Over the following two decades, NMM built an extensive national network. It established over 100 Manuscript Resource Centres at universities, libraries, museums, and heritage institutions. Its conservation centres trained specialists in the repair of deteriorating palm-leaf and paper manuscripts. The Kritisampada digital repository has catalogued hundreds of thousands of manuscripts, making bibliographic data accessible online for the first time.
In 2023, the Mission was reconstituted under the Government's Gyan Bharatam initiative, which sought to deepen the integration of manuscript preservation with wider programmes of indigenous knowledge documentation. The reconstitution signalled continued government commitment to the Mission's work beyond its original framework, repositioning manuscript heritage as a source of contemporary research, data-driven scholarship, and cultural identity.
Visit & Access
Founding & Leadership
Initiatives & Portfolio
National digital repository providing online access to catalogued and digitised manuscripts.
A national network of over 100 centres at universities, museums and heritage institutions for manuscript surveying and documentation.
Specialist centres for physical conservation and restoration of deteriorating manuscripts.
A reconstituted framework (2023) integrating manuscript preservation with indigenous knowledge documentation and data-driven scholarship.
Financial support for scholars working on manuscript cataloguing, translation and research.
The National Mission for Manuscripts is significant because it confronts a problem of civilisational scale: the potential permanent loss of knowledge systems that have no parallel elsewhere in the world. India's manuscript collections contain unique material on mathematics, astronomy, medicine, logic, music, dance, grammar, philosophy, and theology, much of it untranslated and unstudied. NMM is the only national initiative systematically working against the clock on this. Its Kritisampada database and its network of conservation centres represent the most comprehensive institutional effort to make this heritage legible to scholars, practitioners, and the broader public. Without this infrastructure, the default is continued deterioration and undocumented loss.
NAMAMI is one of India's most consequential cultural institutions precisely because its subject matter is invisible to most people: manuscripts are not performance, not a visible monument, not a festival. They are the silent substrate of Indian intellectual history. NMM's work on cataloguing, conservation, and digital access has material and irreversible consequences for what knowledge survives. Its profile in India's public cultural conversation is disproportionately low relative to its significance, and its partnership with IGNCA, itself one of India's most important cultural research bodies, gives it an institutional foundation of genuine depth.