What is Abhilekh Patal?

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About Abhilekh Patal:

What it is? It is a full-featured web portal to access the National Archives of India’s reference media and its digitized collections through the Internet.
Abhilekh is a Sanskrit term used in India for records since ancient times and Patal is a Sanskrit word meaning a board, platform, or surface.
A combination of both these words has been adopted as an acronym for Portal for Access to Archives and Learning.

Key facts about the National Archives of India

It was established on 11 March 1891 at Calcutta (Kolkata) as the Imperial Record Department, it is the biggest archival repository in South Asia.
It is the repository of the non-current records of the Government of India and is holding them in trust for the use of record creators and general users.
It has a vast corpus of records viz., public records, private papers, oriental records, cartographic records and microfilms, which constitute an invaluable source of information for scholars-administrators and users of archives.
It is Located at the heart of New Delhi
It has one Regional Office in Bhopal and three Records Centres at Bhubaneswar, Jaipur and Puducherry.
Nodal Ministry: It is an Attached Office of the Ministry of Culture, Government of India.

Q1) What are archives?

Archives are collections of historical records and documents that are preserved and organized for research and reference purposes. Archives can include a wide range of materials, such as manuscripts, letters, photographs, maps, audiovisual materials, and digital records.

Source: PM praises “Abhilekh Patal” a portal with over 1 Crore Pages of Historical Records of the National Archive