1. United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA):
- It was established in 1949 by the UN General Assembly after the 1948 Arab-Israeli war.
- Its mandate is to provide aid and protection to Palestinian refugees who were displaced following the 1948 Arab-Israeli conflict, as well as their descendants.
- It operates in Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, Syria, and Jordan.
- India's support to UNRWA includes financial assistance as well as providing medicines based on the agency's specific request.
2. National Mission for Manuscripts (NMM)
- It was launched in 2003 to uncover, document, conserve, and make accessible India’s vast manuscript heritage.
- It is an initiative of the Ministry of Culture to preserve and document India's vast collection of manuscripts.
- The Department of Culture is responsible for implementing the mission, while the Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts (IGNCA) serves as the nodal agency.
- Objective: It is dedicated to conserving manuscripts and disseminating the knowledge contained in them, working toward its motto “conserving the past for the future.”
- India possesses an estimate of five million manuscripts, probably the largest collection in the world.
- 70% of manuscripts are in Sanskrit.
Figure 1 Manuscript
3. Bharat-Gen Project
- Ministry of Science & Technology launched BharatGen, a generative AI initiative designed to enhance public service delivery.
- It aims to create foundational models in language, speech, and computer vision to address India's socio-cultural and linguistic diversity.
- It is the world’s first government-funded Multimodal Large Language Model (LLM) project for Indian languages.
- LLMs are AI systems capable of understanding and generating human language by processing vast amounts of text data.
- It is led by IIT Bombay under the National Mission on Interdisciplinary Cyber-Physical Systems (NM-ICPS), and involves collaboration with academic institutions like IITs and IIM Indore.