What is Abhilekh Patal?

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.

 

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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