Over 51,500 film cans have reportedly gone missing from the National Film Archive of India.
According to an Indian Express report, over 51, 500 cans of film reels and over 9,200 prints were not physically present at the archives and 4,922 cans containing 1,112 films which were not listed in the Archive's registers were found present in its vaults.
The list of film titles missing include the ones made by Satyajit Ray (Pather Panchali, Aparajito and Charulata), Mother India by Mehboob Khan, Guru Dutt's 'Kaagaz Ke Phool', Raj Kapoor's 'Mera Naam Joker', 'Awara' and Mrinal Sen's 'Bhuvan Shome'.
The Archives has also apparently lost foreign titles like Eisenstein's 'Battleship Potemkin', Akira Kurosawa's 'Seven Samurais' and Vittoria De Sica's 'Bicycle Thieves' as well.
The information was found by Cameo Digital Systems Pvt Ltd which was given the responsibility of barcoding the reels possessed by NFAI in 2012.
Reportedly, footages of Mahatma Gandhi's Paris visit Richard Nixon's address during his India visit in 1969, Indian National congress' Karachi congregation are also missing.
The films which were present in the vaults but not recorded in the registers include classics like two reels of 'Mughal-E-Azam', two reels of 'Aparajito', one reel of 'Meghe Dhaka Tara', four reels of 'Pather Panchali' etc.
The Indian Express report also finds that there are 1,761 books missing from the NFAI library over the years as well as 401 missing DVDs.