India’s history in a digital avatar: Archive 2.0

Now, 34 crore pages of these rare documents that span over 250 years of the country’s recorded history are being digitised in the heart of the national Capital, in two buildings of the NAI on Janpath – an exercise unprecedented in scale and ambition.

If all goes as planned, the Rs 150-crore project will be completed in the next two years, after which some of the rarest of records housed in the National Archives building will be saved for posterity in their newfound digital avatars, alongside their physical versions.

Letters written by some of India’s greatest, from Mahatma Gandhi to Jawaharlal Nehru to Sardar Patel are housed at the NAI, the country’s official record-keeper since Independence.

But for all of these 34 crore papers to be digitised and conserved, a massive scaling up of resources and pace had to be effected.

“The digitisation project was mooted some years ago. Over the last two years, we were able to put up four crore pages on the NAI’s ‘Abhilekh Patal’ portal. But then we realised that since we have 34 crore pages, at this rate, it would take us 38 years. We had to scale up 10 times and streamline a lot of processes,” says Arun Singhal, Director-General of NAI.

The additional load has meant more staff, more work, more shifts and more activity at the building that until recently was the most low-profile in the neighbourhood – it is flanked by the busy Kartavya Path (erstwhile Rajpath) and, across the road, is the construction frenzy of the Central Secretariat buildings.

Samghatasutra from Gilgit in 627-628_CE

D-G Singhal calls the sudden rush of activity at NAI a “precursor” to what’s in store. “This activity will go up many fold. What you have seen is just a glimpse of what is going on… a precursor,” he says.

A monument to the past

Walking through the aisle that separates the steel shelves at the NAI’s Heritage Wing, Deputy Director Kalpana Shukla explains that public records in the building are broadly divided into four categories.

The oldest category of documents or ‘Repository 1’, she says, are of the East India Company. “These papers, from 1748-1859, came to the repository from the East India Company and pertain to the departments of defence, home and foreign affairs,” she says.

“The second set of papers are from 1860-1947. There are some two crore pages – home department records, the Instrument of Accession, Gandhi conspiracy papers, and those related to the education and railway departments. The third lot also pertains to the same years but has foreign department records, residency and agency papers and reform office records,” she adds.

It’s the fourth set that has the history of a free India – archived records of ministry documents, private collections and cartographic papers. Most of these are mundane official despatches that with an official stamp or the flourish of a bureaucrat’s signature once determined the course of the country; these now stand yellowing and frayed on the shelves, held together by cotton ropes.

In smaller rooms on this floor are men and women working on pagination, binding and indexing of records.
The NAI also has an Oriental Records Division with papers and farmaans in languages such as Arabic and Persian, says Shukla.

When they were first brought into the building, each of these pages had undergone an extensive quarantine process so that they didn’t end up “infecting” the existing papers in the NAI. After a fumigation process, the papers had been kept in a separate room for anywhere between 72 hours and 20 days before they were declared fit to join the coveted shelves of the record room.

While the future public interface of the NAI could be entirely digital, for now, just as they do every day, a few researchers trickle into the building and place a request for a particular paper or document, after which one of the recordkeepers thumbs through the indexing and lays her hands on the precious papers. On the floors above where the researchers sit poring over these papers is the repository of some of the rarest documents – many of these untouched for decades, but will now be gently taken out, placed on the plate of a scanner and emerge in a new, digitised form.

A conservation plan

But the digitisation process couldn’t have begun without something more urgent. “When we decided that we will have to scan these 34 crore pages over the next two years, I was told that there are some papers that are very brittle. You just can’t scan them,” says Singhal, adding that some of these pages ran the risk of disintegrating if someone so much as touched them or picked them up to take them to the scanner. What was then required, the team decided, was a large-scale repair exercise – a conservation plan.

A “health check-up”, as Shukla calls the screening process, revealed that 15 per cent of the total archival records needed some corrective procedures before they could be digitised. Which meant, a staggering five crore pages had suffered some degree of damage and needed preservation and careful conservation – just the kind of attention an ageing monument would have got.

Inside one of the conservation rooms are 25 youngsters, who are quietly at work. Food, water bottles, even ink pens, are strictly forbidden inside. (Express photo by Divya A)

D-G Singhal says the team began by devising a Standard Operating Procedure as part of which all the papers were divided into three categories, A, B and C, with A the “completely healthy” ones. “Category B has papers that can be scanned but the margins are frayed, so these need to be repaired after scanning. But it’s Category C that’s the most delicate – these papers have to be repaired and then scanned. When we segregated all the papers, we found that 15 per cent of the papers (or 4.5 crore of the 30 crore-odd pages) were in Category C,” Singhal says.

The scale of the conservation meant that the NAI would have needed more hands. While it had 50 regular ‘repairers’, it now needed at least 1,000 of them. “But the first challenge was space. Where do we seat so many people? Also, since this is a heritage building, we can’t disturb too many things. So, we decided to work in two shifts — with 500 people in each,” explains Singhal.

The plan was worked out to the last detail. They figured that each ‘repairer’ would need a workspace of about 60-70 sqft – about 30 sqft for the seating area, besides space for drying pages, a washing area and so on.
“We went into each of the rooms in the entire building. We cleared an old Gypsy vehicle from one of the garages, old UPS and computer monitors from a room, air conditioners from another… Ultimately, we cleaned a lot of junk and created space,” says Singhal.

Just when they had figured out the space, they hit another wall — they would have to procure much more of a special German tissue paper that is required to laminate damaged pages that are printed on both sides. Once laminated, these are known to last 200 years or so. While in normal course, the NAI procures 1,000 realms per year, they would now need the same number of rolls every month.

Singhal says they also designed a course to train the conservators. “We don’t really need very highly qualified people. Anyone who has cleared Class 12 is ready for the job once they have undertaken a two-week course. It’s not a very complicated process, only repetitive, and you become perfect with practice,” he says.

Inside one of the conservation rooms are 25 youngsters, who are quietly at work. Food, water bottles, even ink pens, are strictly forbidden inside. “If we have to mark something, we can only use pencil not ink,” says Shilpa Mishra, one of the conservators. Mishra, 21, who takes home Rs 15,000 a month, dropped out of school after Class 12, but can now deftly “operate” on up to 50 precious pages a day.

Holding up a frayed sheet – the clipping of an Urdu newspaper – the ink missing in parts, one of the supervisors explains, “Since this is a one-sided page, it has been stuck on a special handmade paper. The two-sided ones will be repaired using transparent tissue paper. Our team does a de-acidification (using a special mild chemical to remove black blotches) of fragile and damaged pages, after which they are dried with blotting paper. Some of these pages have gone all black, so de-acidification helps. But if big parts of the text are missing, nothing much can be done. It all depends on how the records were kept with the original holders. While some from the 18th century are in good condition, some of the private papers, even if recent, are bad.”

To maintain the pages, the NAI also has to maintain temperature and humidity control at all times.

Under the scanner

In another room, huge overhead scanners imported from France lead the digitisation process, supervised by handlers wearing gloves and masks. The scanners, 45 of them, scan 3.5 lakh pages a day, enabling quick, high-resolution images. At no point does the machine come in contact with the pages.

The digitisation of six crore pages of Repository No. 1 (R1), the oldest set of documents, is currently underway. (Express photo by Divya A)

Some of the pages are also being scanned at the NAI’s regional centres in Bhopal, Bhubaneswar, Puducherry and Jaipur. “Our centres together scan six lakh pages a day. While Delhi works in three shifts, 24×7, other centres work up to 12 hours a day,” says Shukla.

The focus: to complete the digitisation in two years.

“The digitised pages have been stamped and put away. Even if digitised, papers still have to be saved, stored and conserved in physical format,” Shukla explains.

The digitisation of six crore pages of Repository No. 1 (R1), the oldest set of documents, is currently underway. The project has been awarded to a consortium led by private firm CBSL, which is responsible for the uploading, cloud storage and indexing of the papers.

Over the last three months, every page that is scanned is indexed and uploaded on the Archive’s ‘Abhilekh Patal’ website — at the most with a 10-day lag.

‘A continuous process’

Though the NAI is looking at a two-year deadline to wrap up the digitisation, D-G Singhal says they realise it is an exercise that will go on. According to the Public Records Act, all government documents must be declassified and archived after 25 years, except those that need to remain classified. For this, the NAI holds an annual joint appraisal exercise, with their teams visiting every ministry and department to take stock of the documents that will now be saved for posterity. “Whatever is record worthy in terms of administration and history is brought here,” says Singhal.

The next step, he says, would also be to get more visitors on the website. “For this, we need more awareness. People have to know that there are documents coming in every day. That is a continuous process. But once this round of digitisation is complete, history will move from this building to everyone’s smartphones,” he says.