50 Netaji files to be released tomorrow

New Delhi, March 28

The second tranche of 50 declassified files related to Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose will be released on Tuesday.

The files, which will be available online, consist of 10 files each from the Prime Minister's Office (PMO) and Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) and 30 files from Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) pertaining to the period 1956 to 2009.

“The second batch of 50 declassified files relating to Bose will be released on web portal www.netajipapers.gov.in by Culture Minister Mahesh Sharma tomorrow," an official release said.

“This will further meet the continued public demand to access these files and also facilitate scholars to carry out further research on the doyen of the freedom movement," it added.

As many as 100 secret files were made public by Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Netaji's 119th birth anniversary on January 23.

The files, released in January, comprised over 16,600 pages of historic documents, ranging from those from the British Raj to as late as 2007.

In October last year, Prime Minister Narendra Modi had met the family members of Netaji and announced that the government would declassify the files relating to the leader whose disappearance 70 years ago remains a mystery.

While two commissions of inquiry had concluded that Netaji had died in a plane crash in Taipei on August 18, 1945, a third probe panel, headed by Justice M K Mukherjee, had contested it and suggested that Bose was alive. — PTI