PANJIM: With an aim to protect old and fragile documents, the Goa government is all set to digitize around four lakh manuscripts-available with the State Archives-considered to be one of the oldest in Asia-over a period of five years. The marathon project, which is estimated to cost around Rs 100 crore, is mostly like to commence from the coming financial year.
The Archives department has in its collection about 6,000 manuscripts in several languages including Portuguese, Arabic, and Persian languages besides Indian vernacular languages. The digitization of records attains more importance now with several land grab cases with document manipulation, being surfacing in the State. Three officers from the department, including record attended- currently under suspension- were arrested by Special Investigating Team (SIT) in the land scam cases.
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The State government has entrusted the task of digitization to the Info Tech Corporation of Goa (ITG) who has already floated four tenders to appoint different agencies to digitise documents of various government departments, including Archives.
“All the records available with us are dating back to the time when the state was under the Portuguese rule. We have no records post 1961 in our archives,” Director Archives Deepak Bandekar told O Heraldo.
Bandekar said that ITG is appointed as the consultant to handle the tendering process. “We are hopeful that the project will commence from coming financial year. The project will go on for five years. These are fragile documents which need to be digitized in their original format,” he explained.
He said that the move will boost the Government’s effort to use technology to improve the lives of people. The archives data comprises of land records, official documents and correspondence between the Portuguese-ruled Goa and neighbouring kingdoms.
“We have a preservation unit where these documents are preserved at present,” Bandekar said adding the department, prior to this, has digitized birth and death records from 1914 to 1970.
Bandekar said that the department continues to follow the old system where public is allowed to scan the documents as per their requirement. “We cannot stop them. That would be like doing injustice to them. SIT investigation has revealed that departmental staffs were involved in forging documents or taking the record books outside. Common citizens, who visit here, for their documents, were not part of it,” he said.
