India's Ministry of Culture has forged a landmark partnership with Google Arts & Culture to digitally transform the nation's vast heritage, making ancient monuments, museum collections, and living traditions accessible globally. This initiative aims to preserve India's civilisational breadth, including the upcoming Yuge Yugeen Bharat Museum, and enhance public engagement through cutting-edge technology and multilingual access.
New Delhi – India’s Ministry of Culture has cemented a significant partnership with Google Arts & Culture, initiating a sweeping digital transformation to safeguard and globally showcase the nation’s invaluable cultural heritage. The Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) aims to digitise an extensive array of India’s historical, artistic, and traditional assets, dramatically enhancing public accessibility and preservation for future generations.
This collaboration will encompass the civilisational breadth of India, bringing online everything from the ancient monuments and archaeological sites protected by the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) to the rich collections housed within national museums. It also extends to the intricate manuscript heritage being documented under the ‘Gyan Bharatam’ initiative and the diverse crafts, performing arts, and living traditions nurtured by the Ministry’s institutions nationwide.
Yuge Yugeen Bharat Museum at Core of Digital Push
A central pillar of this digitisation drive is the ambitious Yuge Yugeen Bharat Museum, currently under development in the iconic North and South Blocks of New Delhi. This museum, designed to chronicle India’s history across the ages, will see its entire collection and the buildings themselves digitally recorded. This move offers the public an early, virtual window into what is slated to be one of the most significant cultural undertakings of modern India, ensuring a lasting digital record of its wealth of artefacts.
Expanding Accessibility and India’s Creative Economy
The MoU is integral to the Ministry of Culture’s broader strategy to bolster accessibility and expand its digital footprint. The objective is to enable exploration of India’s heritage in various Indian languages and across all digital devices, reflecting a ‘whole-of-Ministry’ approach. This comprehensive strategy intertwines preservation efforts, public access, and the growth of India’s creative economy, leveraging institutions of all sizes and cross-sectoral partnerships.
“India’s cultural heritage is a living inheritance. It belongs to every citizen and speaks to the whole world,” stated Shri Vivek Aggarwal, Secretary, Ministry of Culture. “Our partnership with Google Arts & Culture brings technology to bear on documenting, preserving and sharing that inheritance, from our ancient manuscripts and monuments to the collections of our national museums and the upcoming Yuge Yugeen Bharat Museum. By making these treasures available in Indian languages and to audiences across the globe, we hope to bring more people closer to the story of Indian civilisation, and to safeguard it for generations to come.”
Google Arts & Culture has a longstanding engagement with India’s cultural institutions, having previously aided the Archaeological Survey of India, the National Museum, and the National Gallery of Modern Art in broadening the reach of their collections.
Mr. Amit Sood, Vice President and Founder, Google Arts & Culture, remarked, “For the past 15 years, Google Arts & Culture has been deeply inspired by India’s millennia of storytelling, artistic mastery and vast heritage. Our partnership with the Ministry of Culture represents a shared commitment to preserve India’s timeless treasures with the help of cutting-edge technologies. Whether supporting the vision for the Yuge Yugeen Bharat Museum or preserving historic manuscripts, we are honoured to deploy our technologies to bridge ancient heritage with modern accessibility, making these collections freely discoverable to educate, inspire, and delight curious minds everywhere.”
This agreement underscores the Ministry’s unwavering commitment to preserving India’s civilisational legacy, championing its creative economy through strategic alliances, and disseminating its rich culture to the widest possible audiences both domestically and internationally. This report is based on information from the Press Information Bureau (PIB).
Reporting and source materials courtesy of Press Information Bureau.
