The grassroots push to digitize India's most precious documents

"Getting access to many of our public libraries is so difficult, and after a point people will give up asking for access. That's the case in many of our public-funded educational institutes too," says Arul George Scaria, an associate professor at the National Law School of India University Bengaluru, who studies intellectual-property law. One of the best ways to liberate access to these libraries, he says, is through digitization. Technologist Omshivaprakash H L felt the acute lack of such resources when he needed references for writing Wikipedia articles in Kannada, a southwestern Indian language. Around 2019, he heard that Carl Malamud, who runs Public Resource, a registered US charity, was already archiving books like Gandhi's Hind Swaraj collection on Indian self-rule and works of the Indian government in the public domain.