Punjab hopes to bring the past to the present

ACS orders records spanning over 400 years be digitised

LAHORE: Additional Chief Secretary Punjab Shamail Ahmad Khawaja has given orders to start the digitisation process for the comprehensive preservation of the Punjab government’s archives.

The records span over 400 years of Punjab’s rich history and are of great cultural/administrative importance. The completion of the project will allow newly-inducted civil servants, students and research scholars to get easy access to accessible official documents. The secretary believed this would allow these individuals to chalk out a better strategy to accelerate the pace of progress in the province.



While talking to the Punjab Archives and Libraries Secretary Tahir Yousaf during a briefing on Tuesday, Khawaja said that the province possesses a rich heritage of administrative innovations to promote cultural and fiscal growth.

“We feel pride in the treasure trove of archives from the year 1629 to 2005. Some of the documents include those from the Mughal dynasty starting from Shah Jahan to the last emperor Bahadur Shah Zafar. There are also records of the 50 year regime of Maharaja Ranjeet Singh and from the British Raj in Punjab starting from 1849 to 1947.”



The secretary added the archives, from the day of Pakistan’s creation till the year 2005, were also available in original form at the Civil Secretariat in Lahore. He stated there was a dire need to digitise the archives so that official papers of evidential importance and revenue records could be made accessible to the young bureaucrats and research scholars. “This would help seek out precedents which can provide us a basis for a better future in light of our glorious past,” the ACS concluded.

Published in The Express Tribune, September 6^th, 2017.