Since 2016, Shaunak Chakraborty has been observing Indian people who are struggling to create Wikipedia pages. He understood the difficulty of this process. He developed sympathy for these people of his nation and wanted to take action.
On April 1, 2018, he invited his school juniors—Anandita Bist, Sai Gaurav, Daksh, Akansha Kumari, and Tejas—for a group discussion on this topic. They suggested creating a website similar to Wikipedia, though they recognized that replicating it would be extremely difficult. On July 25, 2018, Shaunak Chakraborty consulted with website makers for suggestions, and he was told the entire process for creating a site like Wikipedia. Subsequently, the Gyaanipedia Foundation was formed by Shaunak Chakraborty on August 16, 2018.
Under this foundation, the website Gyaanipedia was finally launched on August 30, 2018, marking an online historical day for the struggling people of India. This site was initially formed under Wikia, which was powered by Fandom, but the independent MediaWiki site was eventually launched on October 31, 2018. It is the first Indian online encyclopedia with no restrictions and the first wiki website to feature the IST (Indian Standard Time) time zone.
It operates using the same MediaWiki open-source software that Wikipedia uses. The Hindi and Bangla versions were launched on November 9, 2018, followed by the Telugu version on November 12, 2018.