New Delhi: Chandan Sinha has written at least 151 letters a year to government ministries spread across Lutyens’ Delhi — one each to every secretary of every central government ministry and department. He is India’s record keeper, and it is his job to remind them to send their records to the National Archives of India (NAI).
But he is increasingly frustrated at the lack of regard for the preservation of India’s contemporary history. At least eight ministries have never sent any of their records to the archives, according to him.
“Records are not 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 what is meant to be a repository of every important public document that is over 25 years old.
At a workshop this month on good governance organised by the Department of Administrative Reforms and Public Grievances, Sinha said the archives didn’t have documents on important events in modern India, such as the wars of 1962, 1965, and 1971. Papers related to the Emergency and the Green Revolution are also missing.
“I just wanted to emphasise a point — everyone should know what our position is. We have to start taking records more seriously,” Sinha told ThePrint.
Much of the conversation around the NAI has been about the Central Vista redevelopment project and the threat it poses to the archives. Hundreds of historians from across the world wrote open letters to the NAI expressing concern over the future of the archives. But what is usually overlooked is a deep-rooted problem: that ministries themselves are not sending their documents to the NAI.
There are no records at all 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 — among others.
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 even began.
“It’s not a problem of the sources not being there, it’s a problem of the sources not being available — and that kills scholarship,” said a scholar enrolled at a foreign university who researches at the NAI. “No other national archive is like this. It’s not only a big disservice to scholars, it’s a disservice to the public.”
Also read: The two anxieties surrounding India’s archives
The record keepers’ dilemma
Everyone who uses the archive is familiar with the painstaking effort of going through the NAI’s transfer list and index to requisition documents in the hope of finding something useful.
What’s more painful is having a requisition slip returned marked “NT” — not transferred.
These are the files that technically exist in the public record, but just haven’t been transferred from the record-creating agency to the NAI. Scholars complain that they’ve begun thinking about what to research based on what’s available and accessible at 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 either marked top secret, secret, or confidential) aren’t sent to the NAI. It’s the creating agency that decides if a document is classified or not.
The issue, however, is that many creating agencies have not been doing their due diligence and maintaining their own record rooms, and now there’s a massive backlog of documents that have not yet been sent to the archives.
At the workshop on 23 December, Sinha said that the NAI has got the 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, the defence ministry this year transferred 20,000 files going up to the year 1960. Between Independence and the beginning of 2022, however, it had sent just 476 files. The defence ministry is yet to respond to questions sent by ThePrint via text message. If a response is received, this report will be updated.
Sinha said that while the NAI does receive records from such ministries, they are sometimes from different wings within the same ministry.
“So it’s an incomplete picture,” he said.
The process of keeping records
Transparent records are key to understanding modern, democratic India. As historian Narayani Basu writes in The Indian Express, “A country’s evolution is not just about bloodshed, protests and stirring public speeches. It is, at its heart, about paperwork”.
The stereotype of a dusty government office with overstuffed cabinets, loosely bound files, and documents stacked on every available surface might hold true — but there is, in fact, a system in place to sort through and process these documents.
The creating agency is meant to have a record room, and a records officer in charge of the room. The records officer is responsible for arranging, maintaining, and preserving records. Keeping an updated retention schedule, which determines for how long a document is useful, is part of this. The creating agency usually deals with less important documents, while those that are older than 25 years are earmarked for the NAI.
Then, a team from the NAI visits the records room to evaluate and appraise these papers. Anything deemed useful is marked ‘K’ for Keep, while everything else is marked ‘D’ for Destroy. The documents are then supposed to be transferred to the NAI.
The NAI holds training workshops for records officers regularly. Some of the agencies that have recently reached out to the NAI for help include the President’s Secretariat, the Films Division of India, and the Ministry of Steel. “We’re there to help ministries out all the time. We train their record officers, visit their offices, see if they have any doubts,” added Sinha.
Also read: Real fight for National Archives should be about what it doesn’t contain, not the relocation
‘Culture of secrecy undemocratic’
These blind spots mean that if anyone wanted to write a history of the development of postcolonial India, they would be hard-pressed to do so — at least through the National Archives.
Scholars at the archives say the frustrating lack of documents available on contemporary India hampers their research process, and that they often end up relying on private collections like the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library. This is especially true when it comes to research on any Indian war, or with material related to the Ministry of Defence.
Foreign scholars also often find themselves in a bind after travelling and obtaining the required permissions. All that effort, only to discover that the material they are after isn’t available at the NAI.
“The fact that India lacks a proper system of public records is a huge handicap to understanding how the country works,” said Dinyar Patel, assistant professor of history at the S.P. Jain Institute of Management and Research (SPJIMR) in Mumbai.
Calling the NAI “abysmal” compared to its foreign counterparts in the UK and the US, Patel said that most archives in India can be obstructive and are not designed to help users.
In contrast to the situation in India, the US government routinely releases declassified Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) documents. Earlier this month, for instance, it released more than 12,000 files on former President John F. Kennedy’s assassination — a seminal but sensitive point in American history.
Patel, who has also written a series for the New York Times on the NAI, added that no private archive could ever be a substitute for the documents created by the Government of India.
“This culture of secrecy is so undemocratic,” he said. “We cannot write the history of the country properly while the source material is kept locked up by bureaucrats.”
This article is part of a series on the state of India’s archives. Read all articles here.
(Edited by Asavari Singh)