The figure they found out after their pilot survey in three states, had shot up to a staggering 50 lakh manuscripts, making India the largest storehouse of the `records of yore' in the world. And the count is not the final tally, says Sudha Gopalakrishnan, director of the mission.

Seven lakh of these are just from the three states-UP, Bihar and Orissa, where the mission surveys were held. And of the interesting volumes that they came across include a voluminous copy of the Mahabharata weighing a quintal and a metre long copy of Quran.

The mission, established in 2003 by the centre under the Ministry of Culture to attend to the unkempt manuscripts across the country, plans to embark on a hunt for the ancient volumes in states such as Rajasthan and Gujarat.

The last year's search in three states - 30 districts of Orissa, 13 districts of Uttar Pradesh and 10 districts of Bihar was carried out through a well-defined strategy involving around 2700 people. "We involved students and teachers in our drive to find the scriptures. They then searched the villages in the districts-in libraries, temples, monasteries and Madrassas for the texts," says Gitanjali, co-ordinator of the survey.

From Orissa itself, around 17,857 repositories were found, most of them containing texts of the 'tantric' thought. From Unnao in up about 25,000 manuscripts were procured.

The 50 lakh also includes manuscripts that were digitized and documented such as the 500 manuscripts of the 6000 stored at the Iqbal library in Srinagar and 85 manuscripts of 1,000 Kudiyattam manuscripts from Kerala.

The mission has also identified 3,500 manuscripts from the Orissa state museum, 4,000 vaishnavite manuscripts from Majuli islands in Assam and 6,500 manuscripts from Tamil Nadu about Siddha stream of medicine, digitisation of which began from January 15 this year, according to a report prepared by the mission.

Yet another project of the mission is to embark on preservation of manuscripts with natural ingredients and considering the climatic conditions of the area of preservation.

There are references on preservation of scriptures in ancient and medieval literature such as Ashokan edicts, Kautilya's Arthashastra, puranas, Dasabodhas and the medieval saint literature, Shreenand Bapat, an indology lecturer at Tilak Maharashtra Vidyapeeth says in a paper that he compiled on preserving ancient scriptures.

Saroj V Bhate, honorary secretary of Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute (BORI) in Pune, says the institute is planning to coach around 30 people in indigenous methods of conservation.

"One of the reasons for bringing the manuscripts from Mumbai to Pune in 1971 was because the climate here is dry. There need not be much done to preserve the documents, except for treatment with tobacco powder and camphor. But that is not the case with the areas in the coastal belt, where humidity is more," Bhate says.

Sudha Gopalakrishnan says they had organised an exhibition and seminar where different regions across the country had exhibited their specific method of preservation. These would be compiled into reference texts and would be used for preservation works in future, she says.