Iran to digitise Hyd state archives

The Iranian government is sponsoring a project to digitise the state archives at Hyderabad, which has a 100-year-old history and holds manuscripts and books that dates back to the 14th century AD.

A memorandum of understanding with the Andhra Pradesh government was signed on Tuesday by the consul general of Iran, under which Iranian experts will undertake digitisation, restoration and copying of important manuscripts and books out of a 50-million page archival wealth at their government's cost.

While the location of the Iran Consulate in Hyderabad itself shows their strong cultural bondage with the city, which has a substantial population of Iranian descent that had popularised Irani chai here, the Iranian government's keenness to preserve the wealth of the state archives also stems from the fact that it has manuscripts and books written in Persian, Urdu and Arabic pertaining to the culture and administrative history of the past rulers including Bahmanis, Moghuls, Deccan Sultans, and Nizams among others.

"Many historical documents are preserved in the state archives. It will prove a field for historians to study the past history if we provide easy access to these manuscripts and books through digitisation besides preserving them for posterity," Hussein Ravesh, consul general of Iran, told the media.

The project would cost anywhere between Rs 60 crore and Rs 200 crore depending on how many pages from the archives would be digitised and preserved through chemical processes on a priority basis.

The state government has appointed a technical committee comprising officials and an advisory committee with academicians for the same.

Minister for information and public relations and state archives, Anam Ramanarayana Reddy, said the Iranians had also agreed to a proposal to take up digitisation and repairs of records in other languages including English, Telugu, Kannada and Marathi in the state archives.

Iranians took interest in the state archives long back and approached the state government in 2005 with a proposal to digitise the archives at their own cost.