What ails our research institutions

The Right to Information Act has been justly hailed as one of the significant pieces of legislation enacted by the first UPA government. It has suddenly made even government files accessible to the common man. Unfortunately, historians working on modern Indian history are not given access to most of the official documents pertaining to the post-Independence period. For the simple reason that these files have not been transferred to the National Archives of India (NAI). Officially speaking, government documents that are more than 30-years-old should be declassified and made accessible to scholars. However, the practice of routinely transferring official documents to the NAI seems to have been given a go-by ever since the British left India. In the interest of transparency, the UPA government, particularly its scholar prime minister should make it a point that all official documents are transferred to the NAI for historians to study them.

Even the documents transferred to the NAI are not easily available to scholars as the rules and procedures are far from researcher-friendly. Scholars have to plough through long indexes and requisition documents one by one, often to be told that they are not available. Babudom goes to the ridiculous extent of issuing one letter at a time, were one to requisition, say, correspondence of a particular leader. The NAI and for that matter state archives are not adequately equipped with microfilm readers to peruse matter on film. In fact, technology could come to the aid of the researcher had the indexes to documents been digitised and made available on intranet. Most of the holdings could also be digitised and put on intranet or even internet as the British Library has done with old newspapers and as the Nehru Memorial Library in New Delhi is in the process of doing.

But all this needs vision and leadership and, alas, that leadership is missing. In fact, the National Archives of India has been functioning without a director for about five years. Naturally the place tends to run on auto-pilot for some time and then lose its bearings and direction. It is unfortunate that a government that has rightly recognised the importance of building a knowledge society has ignored the needs of institutions like the NAI.

The recent experience of the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library (NMML) in New Delhi shows how world-class institutions can deteriorate in the absence of proper leadership. For over two years after the tenure of Dr Kejriwal came to an end, NMML did not have a director. A joint secretary at the culture ministry was given additional charge of NMML and the deputy director had the run of the place. During that time even routine maintenance was ignored to the extent that scholars had to sweat it out in the hermetically sealed reading room of the library as the air conditioning was off. (It took the new director some time to get the AC working again.)

Rules and regulations were bent to please influential scholars. There were academic irregularities as well, for instance in the award of fellowships so much so that a parliamentary committee that went into the award of fellowships during the time NMML was de facto run by the deputy director was constrained to ask for disciplinary action against the officer. The committee went on to note that ���the whole exercise of selection of candidates for grant of fellowships was not transparent and did not have the sanctity of law���. It is another matter that the selection board for fellowships consisted of ���eminent historians��� like Ram Guha. Not surprisingly, after the deputy director was suspended by the chairman of the Executive Council, in compliance with the directives of the parliamentary committee, this anthropologist-turned-historian has been spearheading a campaign in support of the suspended officer allegedly because such disciplinary action has demoralised the NMML staff. He has even started a signature campaign against the current director ��� one of the charges against the director being that she demoralised the staff by suspending the deputy director!

The condition of research institutions across the country is no better. Some of the state archives function like government offices, 10 am to 5 pm with lunch and tea breaks, much to the inconvenience of scholars who visit these institutions from all parts of the country and abroad. The cavalier attitude of governments towards archival records and historical research is best illustrated by the fate of the Patiala state archives, depository of rare documents belonging to the princely states of Punjab. A few years ago the entire collection of records was bundled out of the building to make way for a heritage hotel.