Exactly 64 years after it first hosted the Indian Historical Records Committee, Hyderabad again hosted the meeting that brought together the leading lights of the community of archivists at the Marri Chenna Reddy Human Resource Development Institute on Tuesday. “We are not producing enough non-fiction which leads to a conclusion that not much research is happening in the country. You cannot do online research by browsing websites,” said Raghvendra Singh, Director-General, National Archives of India making a case for deeper involvement in archiving and preserving documents. “Digitisation of documents is happening but there is no focus. Documents are dumped for digitisation which are not important. The real interesting documents that need to be digitised have to be first preserved and that’s not happening. The quality of archiving has declined. Money is not an issue. Passion is. There is no passion for this work,” said Mr. Singh rapping his colleagues from across the States for not doing enough.
Later, inaugurating the two-day meeting, Telangana Deputy Chief Minister Kadiam Srihari said the State is willing to go all out to digitise the documents in the Telangana State Archives. “There are 15 million rare documents in the State archives. We can digitise them on our own and within one year,” said Mr. Srihari.