Chhattisgarh Chief Minister Vishnu Deo Sai on Monday, 1 June 2026, viewed rare manuscripts estimated to be around 150 years old at Gram Panchayat Badekanera in Kondagaon district during the state's ongoing Sushasan Tihar outreach programme, highlighting the region's deep-rooted manuscript traditions written in the Odia language.

Context

Sharing the visit on social media, CM Sai wrote that the occasion gave him a chance to connect with the state's rich knowledge tradition and cultural heritage. 'पंजी, पुराण, पंचांग सहित उड़िया भाषा में लिखित ये अमूल्य पांडुलिपियां' ['These priceless manuscripts — including Panji, Puranas and Panchang — written in the Odia language'], he noted, are a living heritage of the wisdom, cultural consciousness and life-philosophy of ancestors.

Kondagaon, a district in northern Chhattisgarh with significant tribal populations, has documented manuscript traditions in Odia and local languages, making the Badekanera find consistent with the area's known cultural heritage. The manuscripts include religious and almanac texts that reflect centuries of local scholarly activity.

Policy Backdrop

CM Sai linked the conservation of these texts to the 'Gyan Bharatam Rashtriya Pandulip Survey Abhiyan', a central government initiative promoted under Prime Minister Narendra Modi, under which rare manuscripts across India are being surveyed, conserved and digitised. The Chief Minister described it as 'an important and far-sighted effort to safeguard our glorious heritage and pass it on to the new generation.'

This national campaign builds on the National Mission for Manuscripts, a Ministry of Culture programme launched in February 2003 to locate, catalogue and preserve India's estimated 40 million manuscripts. Digitisation guidelines issued subsequently aimed at building a national database of rare texts. The Gyan Bharatam campaign represents the current phase of that broader archival effort.

Stakeholders and Impact

The manuscripts at Badekanera are of direct significance to heritage researchers, custodians of Odia manuscript traditions, and Chhattisgarh's tribal communities, who retain oral and written knowledge systems that are not widely documented. Digitisation under the national survey would make these texts accessible to scholars and the general public through a central digital archive.

Sushasan Tihar — the state's governance outreach programme — has increasingly served as a platform to surface such local cultural assets and connect them with central government schemes. The Badekanera visit is illustrative of how field-level discovery and national policy frameworks are being aligned to prevent further physical deterioration of irreplaceable texts.

What's Next

The immediate step would be formal documentation and inclusion of the Badekanera manuscripts in the district-level survey reports under the Gyan Bharatam campaign. Once catalogued, the texts are expected to undergo digitisation and potential integration into the national digital library portal, making them accessible beyond Chhattisgarh.

The visit signals that the state government intends to use future Sushasan Tihar rounds to identify further undocumented manuscript repositories across Chhattisgarh's culturally diverse districts, potentially expanding the scope of the national survey in the region.