Guides tours for visitors at National Museum

Want to know more about the Dancing Girl or the Standing Buddha from the Mohenjo-daro or the Gandhara period of the country? Head straight for the National Museum in the city which is launching free guided tours from today.
The 90 minutes "Path Pradarshak", Volunteer Guide Programme showcases highlights of the Museum for visitors. Under the programme, the galleries as well as around 30 objects on display will be introduced by trained volunteers.
Union Minister of Culture Chandresh Kumari Katoch launched the programme last evening.
"The volunteer Guide programme, is a commitment the national museum is making. From tomorrow onwards on every working day of the national museum, we are committed to run atleast two free guided tours for the visitor," said Venu Vasudevan, Director General, National Museum.

"For me this is really great pleasure to be here to see a change which we all have been wanting for a very long time," said Katoch. She said at first there was a very negative response for the project.
"People said nobody is going come, but I'm very delighted to tell you that more than 400 people applied for this course and that is their love for treasures, our culture that brought them forward" added the minister.

Katoch said that the programme is not job oriented , just love-oriented for the culture and history of India.
The minister underlined that for long the prevailing notion was that museums were just a place to protect artifacts, exhibits and only a very few people think it could be more than just that.

"Recently I was in England , France and Vienna, and when I went around their museums I realised that they also previously had this concept, that it was just to preserve our antiques, but their notions changed about 30 years ago and they started working in a way that they would convert more museums into research centres, knowledge gaining centres and besides that pleasure centres.