11 lakh pages of Army history to be digitised
Ajay Banerjee
New Delhi, January 13
With several tales of military valour lying buried under inaccessible records, the Army has rolled out a project in which military history will be digitally archived and made available in an easy-to-access format at two locations in the country.
Nearly 11 lakh pages and 700 hours of audio-video content related to declassified records from the 1948 Jammu and Kashmir conflict, 1961 Goa Liberation (Operation Vijay) and India-Pakistan Wars of 1965 and 1971 would be digitised, the Army said. These voluminous records are held with over 1,300 units, Army formations, regimental centres and military museums in the form of battle memoirs.
Once these reports and audio-visual films are curated, digitised and preserved, these will be available at “digital archive kiosk” created at think-tank United Services Institute of India, New Delhi.
Subsequently, another kiosk will be established at the upcoming history cell of Army War College, Mhow, Madhya Pradesh. These kiosks will be accessible to researchers, academicians and scholars in an interactive webpage format.
However, this does not mean that records like the Kargil conflict and the dramatic capture of Siachen Glacier in 1984 will be available as these have not been declassified by the Ministry of Defence (MoD). In June 2021, the MoD approved a policy on archiving, declassification and compilation and publication of histories of wars and military operations. The requirement of having war histories written with a clear-cut policy on declassification of war records was recommended by the Kargil Review Committee headed by K Subrahmanyam and also by a committee headed by former Defence Secretary NN Vohra.
