Top job at Nehru memorial to go to eminent scholar with proven record on Nehruvian studies

NEW DELHI: Months after the controversial exit of Director Mahesh Rangarajan, the Nehru Memorial Museum & Library ( NMML) has proposed that the top job at the organization should ideally only go to an eminent historian with a proven track record of research work on Nehru and Nehruvian themes. In a bid to attract in the best of scholars from across institutions, it has also been proposed to offer a more attractive and consolidated pay packet of around Rs 2.5 lakh per month to the Director, free of the cumbersome government pay scale system.

NMML- an autonomous organization under the Culture ministry- is a leading repository of research on India’s first PM Jawaharlal Nehru, Mahatma Gandhi and the history of India’s independence movement.

The NMML was recently in news over debates on its revamp plans that arguably amounted to dilution of Nehru’s legacy at the eponymous institution.

Now the Executive Committee of the NMML has proposed that the recruitment rules for the Director’s position be ‘tightened’ well enough to ensure that a historian of some eminence is appointed to the post but that alone will not be sufficient.

While the provision to appoint non historians will stay, the other scholars under consideration must also have a proven track record of having engaged with “themes related to Nehru”, highly placed sources well versed with the proposal told ET on condition of anonymity.

While the new recruitment rules do not propose to completely bar non historians, they do demand that they must also come with a body of work on Nehru. A focus on proven leadership skills will also be made desirable.

“While this does not mean non historians will be barred, it is about raising the bar on formal criteria and emphasizing on eminent scholars of distinction having worked on Nehru and related themes so that NMML is better understood and run”, a member of the EC told ET.

The existing recruitment rules have been rather generic on this issue saying historians or social scientists were eligible for the Director’s post.