new Delhi: Chandan Sinha has written at least 151 letters a year to government ministries spread across Lutyens’ Delhi – one to each secretary of each ministry and department of the central government. He is the record keeper of India, and it is his job to remind them to send their records to the National Archives of India (NAI).
But he is increasingly frustrated by the lack of respect for the preservation of India’s contemporary history. According to him, at least eight ministries have never sent any of their records to the archives.
“The record isn’t a high priority, unfortunately,” he shrugs.
Sinha, who took over as director general of the National Archives of India (NAI) three years ago, is in charge of overseeing the repository as every important public document older than 25 years.
Speaking at a workshop on good governance organized by the Department of Administrative Reforms and Public Grievances this month, Sinha said the archives do not contain documents of important events of modern India, such as the wars of 1962, 1965 and 1971. Emergency and Green Revolution are also missing.
“I just wanted to stress one point – everyone should know what our position is. We need to start taking records more seriously,” Sinha told ThePrint.
Much of the conversation surrounding the NAI has been about the Central Vista redevelopment project and the threat it poses to the Archives. Hundreds of historians from around the world wrote open letters to NAI express concern On the future of archives. But what is usually overlooked is a deeper-rooted problem: that the ministries themselves are not sending their documents to the NAI.
There is no record from the ministries of Consumer Affairs, Food and Public Distribution, Women and Child Development, Rural Development, Panchayati Raj, Electronics and Information Technology, Tourism, Steel, Social Justice and Empowerment.
Other ministries such as Parliamentary Affairs, Civil Aviation and Textiles have not sent records since the mid-1970s. The Ministry of Petroleum and Gas has not sent records since the mid-1960s and the Indian Council of Agricultural Research since the early 1950s – a decade before the Green Revolution began.
A scholar enrolled at a foreign university doing research at NAI said, “It’s not a problem of not having sources, it’s a problem of not having sources – and that kills scholarship.” “No other national collection is like it. This is not only a great disservice to the scholars, it is also a disservice to the public.
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record keeper’s dilemma
Everyone who uses the archive is familiar with the painstaking effort of going through the NAI’s transfer list and index of requisition documents in the hope of finding something useful.
What is more painful a requisition slip marked as “NT” – is not being transferred.
These are files that technically exist in the public records, but have not been transferred from the records keeping agency to the NAI. Scholars complain that they have begun to think about what to research based on what is available and what is in the archive.
The Public Records Act of 1993 mandates central ministries and departments to transfer records older than 25 years to the NAI. Classified records (documents marked either Top Secret, Secret, or Confidential) are not sent to the NAI. It is the producing agency that decides whether a document is classified or not.
The issue, however, is that many construction agencies are not doing their due diligence and maintaining their own record rooms, and now have a huge backlog of documents that have not yet been sent to the archives.
At the workshop on December 23, Sinha said that NAI has received records of only 64 agencies, including 36 ministries and departments. The total number of ministries and departments is 151.
There are also at least 90 ministries and departments that are more than 25 years old, whose records should technically be sent to the NAI on a regular basis.
According to Sinha, this year the Ministry of Defense transferred 20,000 files Going to the year 1960. Between independence and the beginning of 2022, however, it had sent just 476 files. The Defense Ministry is yet to respond to queries sent by ThePrint via text message. If a response is received, this report will be updated.
Sinha said that while the NAI receives records from such ministries, they are sometimes from different wings within the same ministry.
“So it’s an incomplete picture,” he said.
record keeping process
Transparent records are the key to understanding modern, democratic India. as historian Narayani Basu writing in Indian Express, “The development of a country is not just about bloodshed, protests and inciting public speeches. It is, at its heart, about paperwork”.
The stereotype of a dusty government office with overcrowded shelves, loose files, and documents piled on every available surface may be true – but in reality, there is a system for sorting and processing these documents.
The making agency has a record room and a record officer who is in charge of the room. The Records Officer is responsible for the arrangement, maintenance and preservation of records. Keeping an updated retention program, which determines how long a document is useful, is part of this. The construction agency usually deals with less important documents, while documents older than 25 years are referred to the NAI.
Then, a team from NAI visits the record room to evaluate and evaluate these papers. Anything deemed useful is marked as a ‘K’ for Keep, while everything else is marked as a ‘D’ for Destroy. Thereafter the documents should be transferred to NAI.
NAI regularly conducts training workshops for records officers. Some of the agencies that have recently reached out to NAI for help include the President’s Secretariat, the Films Division of India and the Ministry of Steel. “We are there to help the ministries at all times. We train their record officers, visit their offices, see if they have any doubts,” Sinha said.
‘Culture of secrecy undemocratic’
These blind spots mean that if one wishes to write a history of the development of postcolonial India, one will be hard pressed to do so – not least through the National Archives.
Archives scholars say that the dismal lack of available documents on contemporary India hinders their research process, and they often rely on private collections such as those at the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library. This is especially true when it comes to researching an Indian war, or with material related to the Ministry of Defence.
Foreign scholars too often find themselves in a bind after traveling and obtaining the necessary permissions. All that effort, only to find that the material they are looking for is not available at NAI.
Dinyar Patel, assistant professor of history at the SP Jain Institute of Management and Research (SPJIMR) in Mumbai, said, “The fact that India lacks a proper system of public records is a major obstacle to understanding how the country functions.” does.”
Calling the NAI “inferior” compared to its foreign counterparts in the UK and the US, Patel said most archives in India can be blocky and not designed to help users.
In contrast to the situation in India, the US government regularly releases declassified Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) documents. Earlier this month, for example, it Free More than 12,000 files on the assassination of former President John F. Kennedy – a seminal but sensitive point in American history.
Patel, who has also written a series for new York Times On NAI, said that no private collection can ever be a substitute for documents maintained by the Government of India.
“This culture of secrecy is so undemocratic,” he said. “We cannot write the history of the country properly as long as the source material is kept locked by the bureaucrats.”
(Edited by Asawari Singh)
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