What is the National Archives of India (NAI)?

About National Archives of India (NAI)

• NAI is the custodian of the records of enduring value of the Government of India.
• Established on March 11, 1891, at Calcutta (Kolkata) as the Imperial Record Department, it is the biggest archival repository in South Asia.
• It was transferred to New Delhi in 1911.
• It functions as an attached office of the Ministry of Culture, Government of India.
• 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.
• The Director General of Archives, heading the Department, has been given the mandate for the implementation of the Public Records Act, 1993, and the rules made there under, the Public Records Rules, 1997, for the management, administration, and preservation of public records in the Ministries, Departments, Public Sector undertakings, etc. of the Central Government.
• Access to the records in the NAI is governed by the provisions of the Public Records Rules, 1997.
• The NAI keeps and conserves records of the government of India and its organisations. It does not receive classified documents.
• Abhilekh PATAL:
  • The Abhilekh PATAL (Portal for Access to Archives and Learning) is an initiative of NAI to make its rich treasure of Indian archival records available to all online.
  • It is a full-featured web portal to access the NIA’s reference media and its digitized collections through the internet.
  • It contains more than 2.7 million files held by the National Archives of India. The Digitized Collections contains over 71792 digitized records for online access.

Q1) What are cartographic records?

Cartographic records may include maps, atlases, charts, globes, and geographic information systems. They commonly represent physical features (land masses, bodies of water, elevations, weather, and coordinates) but may also represent human, animal, plant distributions (population centers or distributions, political and cultural boundaries, migrations).

Source: Book Fair opens at the National Archives of India