Manuscripts in IndiaIndia's wealth of manuscripts is enormous. No one really knows how many manuscripts there are in different languages ​​and scripts. There are palm leaves, birch bark, cloth, wood, stone and paper, although a survey by the National Trust for Art and Cultural Heritage conducted in the late 1980s put the figure at 50 lakh. A good number of them have been cataloged and are preserved in libraries, museums and institutes, but experts are convinced that an even greater number remain undiscovered and undocumented, in various smaller libraries, private collections and religious institutions. A large number of Indian manuscripts are yet to be unearthed,” said Sudha Gopalakrishnan, director of the National Manuscript Mission (NMM). “A larger number needs to be catalogued. Many of them are rapidly decaying and must be properly preserved otherwise they will be lost. . Since then the mission, in collaboration with various allied institutions, has established 27 Manuscript Resource Centers (MRCs) to carry out surveys and awareness campaigns and 20 Manuscript Conservation Centers (MCCs) to help preserve and restore valuable manuscripts . A single pilot project last year brought out 2 lakh manuscripts in UP, 1.5 lakh in Bihar and 2.9 lakh in Orissa. How precious are the manuscripts that have been found? Anything that is handwritten and over 75 years old qualifies as a manuscript, but Sudha insisted that they were very discriminating. We will not collect anything and everything,” he said. “Cadastral documents, horoscopes or personal documents are not what we want. We are looking for documents of a scientific, artistic, historical or spiritual nature...... medium format ......a national mission has been launched for the preservation of manuscripts; The true treasure of India's culture. The Mission has laid emphasis on digital preservation of rare manuscripts across India and has already completed the capture of several manuscripts in digital format. The Indira Gandhi National Center for the Arts (IGNCA) was launched on 19 November 1985 by the late Prime Minister of India Shri Rajiv Gandhi and registered at New Delhi on 24 March 1987. This Center has undertaken a national project for digital preservation of manuscripts. The Center is digitizing a number of manuscripts in Assam too. Khuda Bakhsh Eastern Public Library located in Patna, Bihar undertook a manuscript digitization pilot project in October 2005, which has a large collection of around 21,000 manuscripts in Arabic, Persian, Urdu, Turkish, Hindi and Sanskrit written on palm leaves.