Dnyaneshwari manuscript (1843 CE) - Two pages from the oldest surviving Marathi text, a 13th-century Bhagavad Gita commentary by Dnyaneshwar, digitised by the University of Arizona and the British Library Public domain
Image Credits: By Ms Sarah Welch, CC BY-SA 4.0

Digitisation is being undertaken by a wide range of individuals, organisations, institutions, and groups working in the field of Indian Languages. For a few decades, efforts to digitally preserve materials in Indian languages have been underway, ranging from small-scale collections to massive archives comprising millions of pages and images. Alongside government missions, which operate with official mandates and substantial resources, civil society groups, small organisations, and independent collectives play a vital role in documenting valuable literature and knowledge across languages. However, pre-existing inequalities and resource constraints often shape the scope of this work, influencing which materials and languages are digitised and which are not.

Several challenges limit the overall impact of these efforts. These include constraints imposed by copyright law and hosting platforms, a lack of institutional support, limited opportunities for shared learning and collaboration among organisations working across languages, and gaps in literary data and resource availability. In addition, only a small fraction of digitised materials is accessible to the public, and many are not provided in usable technical formats, such as Unicode text or well-structured metadata. Such collaboration could be particularly consequential for low-resource languages, where individual organisations rarely have the capacity to address documentation, digitisation, and access challenges on their own. While some organisations are addressing these issues and making gradual progress to fix these issues for their efforts, in parallel, early efforts toward building collaborative spaces exist, though they remain nascent and have yet to find broader support. A more coordinated and collaborative approach could significantly accelerate outcomes and ensure that the full benefits of digitisation are realised across all Indian languages: Read more

The Open Knowledge Initiatives (OKI) programme at IIIT Hyderabad is a strategic initiative with the aim of fostering language diversity and promoting equitable access to knowledge across the Indian subcontinent. We join hands with diverse communities to build inclusive, multilingual spaces for collaboration, innovation, and exchange. To learn more about Bahu Bhasa, please visit our website (https://bahubhasa.oki-india.org).

We value your inputs! Share your feedback, suggestions, or ideas about our programs and initiatives. Your perspectives help us better develop the newsletter further. Please write your thoughts to us at contact.oki@research.iiit.ac.in