<h1>Government launches Gyan Bharatam manuscript preservation initiative; policymakers weigh provenance, copyright, data protection, cross-border and institutional rules</h1> An international three-day conference will launch a long-term government-led manuscript preservation initiative under the Gyan Bharatam mission, with senior cabinet officials and the prime minister attending; anticipated legal outputs include a 'New Delhi Declaration' and formation of expert working groups on decipherment, conservation, digitisation, translation, and institutional linkages. Key regulatory and compliance issues likely to arise include provenance and ownership disputes for manuscripts in public and private collections, copyright and sui generis database rights for digitised texts, data protection and AI-use governance for scanning and machine-decoding, cross-border transfer and cultural property rules for international collaboration, and statutory design of the proposed hub-and-spoke institutional framework.