Demolition of the National Museum

Subject : History

Section: art and culture

Context: The National Museum is set to be demolished and the artefacts will be moved to the North and South Blocks.

North and South Blocks will be emptied to become the Yug-Yugeen Bharat Indian Museum.

About the National Museum of India:

Background:

The blueprint for establishing the National Museum in Delhi was prepared by the Maurice Gwyer Committee in May 1946.
An exhibition was organized in the Rashtrapati Bhawan (President’s residence), New Delhi in 1949, which turned out to be a great success.
This event proved responsible for the creation of the National Museum.
State Governments, Museum authorities and private donors, who had participated in the exhibition, were approached for the gift or loan of artefacts, and most of them responded generously.
On August 15, 1949, the National Museum, New Delhi, was inaugurated in the Rashtrapati Bhawan by Shri C. Rajagopalachari, the Governor-General of India.
The foundation of the present building was laid by Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru, the Prime Minister of India, on May 12, 1955.
The first phase of the National Museum Building was formally inaugurated by Dr. Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, the Vice President of India, on December 18, 1960.
The second phase of the building was completed in 1989.
While the Museum continued to grow its collection through gifts that were sought painstakingly, artefacts were collected through its Arts Purchase Committee.

Present Status:

The Museum presently holds approximately 2,00,000 objects of diverse nature, both Indian as well as foreign, and its holdings cover a time span of more than five thousand years of Indian cultural heritage.
The National Museum was initially looked after by the Director General of Archaeology until 1957, when the Ministry of Education, Government of India, declared it a separate institution and placed it under its own direct control.
At present, the National Museum is under the administrative control of the Ministry of Culture, Government of India.

Digitalization of National Museum Collections:

The National Museum has started a special project to digitize its collection of objects in order to make it available for visitors to see online.
This process involves digitization and storage of museum collections in a collection management system named ‘JATAN’, a virtual museum builder software that enables creation of digital collection management systems for Indian museums and is deployed in several national museums across India.
Its objective is to make a digital imprint of all the objects preserved in museums and help researchers, curators and other people interested in the field
JATAN has been designed and developed by Centre for Development of Smart Computing (C-DAC) Pune.