HYDERABAD: Even three years after bifurcation of the Telugu states, valuable documents and old archival records that are in the possession of the Telangana State Archives and Research Institute in Tarnaka are lying in a state of pity. The process of digitisation of the archives which started in 2012 came to a grinding halt in 2014 and has never resumed since then.
With only 46 of the 180 sanctioned posts in the Institute filled and only two of the 22 for safekeeping and maintenance of records in place, the task is getting tougher by the day.Administrative records and documents of Hyderabad and the rest of Telangana that belong to the time period between 1724 and 1953, and composite government orders of Andhra Pradesh after 1953 till 2000, are kept in the stack area.
While those from 1724 and 1885 are in Persian, as it was Hyderabad’s official language back then, records after 1885 until 1950 are mostly in Urdu and partly in English. Of these, only around 58 lakh pages belonging to the period between 1889 and 1950 including those of Andhra Pradesh, have been digitised.
“Administrative records of the Nizam’s dominion, finance and revenue documents, farmans (royal decrees) and some specific records between 1784 and 1880, about the 14 Daftar (offices) are all in the store room. The story of the 14 Daftar that was carried forward from the Mughal era to the Nizam era, where there was one officer for every department, like the Daftar-E Maal for the revenue department is all in our records,” informed MA Raqeeb, assistant director of the Institute.
While 80 per cent of documents are in Urdu, some of them from later years are in English. Once administrative glitches owing to bifurcation are resolved, the next phase of digitisation will be of the older records.