 "India's first transport museum: A bit of old-world charm comes to Delhi-NCR")
Spread over almost 100,000 sq ft, the museum opened in December 2013. It also featured in the Limca Book of Records as India’s first transport museum.
It tells the story of the evolution of India's transport through light and sound, historical art (drawings, lithographs and posters), re-imagined street stalls and contemporary art.
Different parts of vehicles are used for different purposes. So there’s a Ganesha sculpture made out of spare parts from Ford’s cars, and a dissected car doubles up as a ticketing counter and a table.
Thakral gets them mainly from auctions or private channels. Purchase price ranges anywhere between 200,000 to 1.8 million. On top of it, there are restoration charges as well, which also run into lakhs. The wood-bodied tram cost around Rs 350,000 to restore. The museum has a dedicated restoration team working on different vehicles.
“India doesn’t have a museum culture,” says Thakral. “These transportation vehicles are part of the industrial revolution. But most of our museums do not remodel themselves according to the times. Hence, they lose their appeal, especially to the younger generation.
“A lot of the stuff we acquired were those that were being thrown away. Preservation is a problem in this country,” he adds. “Look at Prague, San Francisco or Melbourne for example. Trams are still operating. They are zero-polluting. But we do not have foresight. We haven’t been able to upgrade our services.”
A majority of the vehicles comes from Thakral’s personal collection. He started collecting them in 1994. By 2004, the collection had become so massive that space became a problem. So Thakral would put them in a shed on a piece of his land in Gurgaon.
In 2006, he founded the Heritage Transportation Trust, a not-for-profit trust, with an aim to set up a museum sometime in the future. Soon, after a discussion with the government and a Rs 60 million grant and donations from different people, the museum came into existence.
“Generations have changed so much. They can’t relate to the old transport anymore. We try to give people the knowledge or history part which interests them,” says Thakral.