The Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts has completed the digitisation of 200,000 items of Indian folk art, material culture, and oral tradition — the largest such project in Indian cultural history — including 45,000 Madhubani paintings from Bihar, 28,000 audio recordings of Baul song traditions from Bengal, and 12,000 video documentation sessions of Chhau dance from Jharkhand, Odisha, and West Bengal.

The collection, accessible through the IGNCA's online Cultural Heritage Portal, is available to researchers, educators, and the public without registration. High-resolution digital files are archived in triplicate at geographically distributed servers to ensure redundancy.

The project has also commissioned 800 hours of video ethnography: extended documentation of master practitioners of endangered art forms in their community context, capturing not only the art itself but the social relationships, ritual contexts, and transmission mechanisms that give it meaning.

Digitisation serves both preservation and revitalisation purposes: several Madhubani artists report that visibility on the IGNCA portal and commercial platforms has substantially expanded their market, with buyers reaching them directly from the United States, Europe, and Japan.