The digital preservation and accessibility of historical documents require accurate and scalable Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR). However, progress in this field is significantly hampered for low-resource scripts, such as ancient forms of the scripts used in historical manuscripts, due to the scarcity of high-quality, transcribed training data. We address this critical gap by introducing the AnciDev Dataset, a novel, publicly available resource comprising 3,000 transcribed text lines sourced from 500 pages of different ancient Devanagari manuscripts. To validate the utility of this new resource, we systematically evaluate and fine-tune several HTR models on the AnciDev Dataset. Our experiments demonstrate a significant performance uplift across all fine-tuned models, with the best-performing architecture achieving a substantial reduction in Character Error Rate (CER), confirming the dataset’s efficacy in addressing the unique complexities of ancient handwriting. This work not only provides a crucial, well-curated dataset to the research community but also sets a new, reproducible state-of-the-art for the HTR of historical Devanagari, advancing the effort to digitally preserve India’s documentary heritage.

Difficulty estimation of multiple-choice questions (MCQs) is crucial for creating effective educational assessments, yet remains underexplored in Indic languages like Hindi and Kannada due to the lack of comprehensive datasets. This paper addresses this gap by introducing two datasets, TEEMIL-H and TEEMIL-K, containing 4689 and 4215 MCQs, respectively, with manually annotated difficulty labels. We benchmark these datasets using state-of-the-art multilingual models and conduct ablation studies to analyze the effect of context, the impact of options, and the presence of the None of the Above (NOTA) option on difficulty estimation. Our findings establish baselines for difficulty estimation in Hindi and Kannada, offering valuable insights into improving model performance and guiding future research in MCQ difficulty estimation .