Ministry of skill development has no category at present to define people from creative fields as professionals; Centre to create database of such people.
New Delhi: The culture ministry wants to recognise people from creative fields such as artistes, painters, sculptors and writers as professionals.
At present, the ministry of skill development, which recognises the profession of an engineer, chef or a plumber, does not have a separate category for people associated with art, culture and literature.
Now, the culture ministry wants to provide a separate identity card to this category of people, grade them, link them through their Aadhaar numbers to a separate portal and eventually get the term, ‘artist’, added to the list of officially accepted professions.
To achieve this, the ministry is currently undertaking a “cultural mapping” exercise in all autonomous bodies such as the Lalit Kala Akademi, Sahitya Akademi, Sangeet Natak Akademi, National School of Drama, among others.
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The idea is to gather information on people associated with visual and performing arts from across India, including those from tribal areas and create a database. The “cultural mapping” exercise, one of the pet projects of culture minister Mahesh Sharma, started in mid 2017.
At present, some autonomous bodies such as the Lalit Kala Akademi issue identity cards to artists. However, once the cultural mapping is over, people like artistes, painters and writers will be issued an identification card by the culture ministry with grades such as ‘eligible, ‘eminent’, ‘proficient’, ‘upcoming’ and ‘senior’ written on it, depending on their work.
“The basic idea behind cultural mapping is to collect information on all kinds artists across India,” said a source in the ministry of culture.
“There is also a plan to link all these artists with their Aadhaar number on the portal so that their bank details are with the ministry and they can be paid directly by the government whenever they are participating in an event,” the source added.
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According to the source, the move is aimed at weeding out middlemen who “used to take up most of the money that should have ideally gone to the artists”.
“Once we have achieved most of the goals through cultural mapping, we will eventually submit a proposal to ministry of skill development to include ‘artist’ in the list of professionals in India,” the source added.
According to the central government, there are two categories of artists/artistes — those who are graduate and above, have some work to show at national level exhibitions/shows and tribal or folk artists or those who come from rural areas. The idea of making the database stems from the fact that rural or tribal artists rarely come to limelight and their contribution remains unrecognised most of the time.