This web portal on Mahatma has 19.30 lakh pages and counting

The Gandhi Heritage Portal, a website containing 19.30 lakh pages of content with 20,000 new pages getting uploaded every month, is a treasure trove for a student of Mahatma Gandhi's life.

Www.gandhiheritageportal.org, launched six years ago, has books, journals, photos, audio and video clips, cartoons, posters, stamps and other material on Gandhi in the digital form.

It also hosts an architectural documentation of 23 of the 39 important locations associated with Gandhi's life, including "virtual tours", Virat Kothari, the IT head of the Sabarmati Ashram here, which maintains the portal, said.

Soon, people would be able to have a virtual reality experience of websites related to Gandhi's life through the portal, he added.

Since its launch, the portal had attracted six lakh users, with 1,800 users spending over 30 minutes on it every day, Kothari said.

The Union Ministry of Culture gave the Sabarmati Ashram Preservation and Memorial Trust the responsibility to design and maintain the website, which was launched in September, 2013 by then prime minister Manmohan Singh. It had five lakh pages of content to start with.

"The portal is freely accessible. We borrow documents from Gandhian institutes from different parts of the world, digitise and upload them, and return the original to the owners. We are adding 20,000 pages every month on an average," Kothari said.

"Since April, we have added 1.18 lakh new pages, taking the total to 19.30 lakh," he added.

The portal contains 100 volumes of "The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi", 82 volumes of "Gandhiji No Akshar Deha" (Gandhi's collected works in Gujarati) and 97 volumes of "Sampoorna Gandhi Vangmaya" (collected works in Hindi), as well as the first editions of his seven books, their translations and his Gujarati translation of the Bhagavad Gita.

The website is available in 12 Indian and six foreign languages. It is being made available in 27 other languages, mostly Indian, including the ones spoken in the north-eastern states.

Most of the website's visitors are from India, followed by the US, the UK, Canada, Australia, Japan, France, the UAE, Germany and Bangladesh, Kothari said.

The portal has digital maps, prepared through the Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) technology, of the Sabarmati Ashram, Kochrab Ashram, Bapu Kutir Vardha, Mani Bhavan and Dakshin Bharat Hindi Prachar Sabha, Chennai.

"Efforts are on to cover more sites. It will come in handy at the time of their restoration, if needed," Kothari said.