From tracking cavalry losses in battle to identifying the owners of horses and dealing with officials charging pilgrims for a dip in the Ganges, medieval manuscripts offer an unusually detailed window into how the State functioned. How were losses of cavalry in battle arrived at, and how did the medieval State determine to whom those horses belonged? Or, for that matter, how did rulers in medieval India come to know that officials were charging pilgrims money for a dip in the Ganges? And what was the script on palm leaves that one finds scattered across private collections and government institutions?Access to answers to these and a plethora of other questions connected to administration will become easier, with Telangana closely working with the Government of India to identify, preserve and digitise thousands of manuscripts and make them available to history enthusiasts and research scholars alike.“The Telangana State Archives and Research Centre signed a memorandum of understanding with the Ministry of Culture’s Gyan Bharatam Mission last November,” said State Archives Director Zareena Parveen. “We are surveying, cataloguing, conserving and digitising manuscripts that are with government entities, as well as those held by private citizens, who are willing to allow us to digitise them. Our Special Secretary (Higher Education) Venkatesh Dhotre is the nodal officer. The idea is to have a digital repository of manuscripts online to further the cause of researching India’s cultural heritage, and to better understand our history.”Till September 9, the Gyan Bharatam Mission team working at the State Archives had scanned as many as 6,665 manuscripts. In other words, over 1.61 lakh pages had been digitized thus far. To put the scale of the effort in perspective, as many as 1,300 pages are being scanned each day.A Gyan Bharatam Mission team member at the Telangana State Archives and Research Institute team scans folios. Metadata is then generated after which manuscripts are saved to a document corpus.