Gandhi heritage portal to be a give-&-take gateway

Plans for the awaited Gandhi Heritage Portal, slated to house all the "intellectual" heritage of Mohandas K Gandhi, have been modified to become an open-source repository where registered users can upload material associated with the Independence Movement leader, but which would be uploaded only once a team of researchers prove its authenticity.

The modification to a partly open-source archive was not visualised in the original recommendations of the Gandhi Heritage Committee headed by Gandhi's grandson, Gopal Krishna Gandhi.

The heritage committee had suggested hosting all "intellectual" Gandhian heritage in six clusters, including the Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi (CWMG), Gandhiana (Gandhi's original writings), writings of Gandhi's close associates, autobiographies of Indian leaders during Gandhi's time where Gandhi was mentioned and first and second generation biographies of the leader.

The Union culture ministry had sanctioned Rs 8 crore as a corpus fund to the Sabarmati Ashram Preservation and Memorial Trust (SAPMT), Ahmedabad, to create the portal, and the trust would earn about Rs 75 lakh as annual interest to run and maintain it.

"The core remains the same. But hosting all the materials online would make the portal a mere information portal which shouldn't be the case. That's why we have changed it into an open-source archive, which will go beyond the books, original and related materials. It will be a research-oriented archive for Gandhians, readers and scholars who want to research," says Tridip Suhrud, a noted Gandhian scholar, who was recently appointed "Editor-in-Chief" of the portal and overall director of SAPMT for a period of at least three years.

Before joining the trust he was teaching "Gandhian Philosophy" at Dhirubhai Ambani Institute of Information and Communication Technology, Gandhinagar.

While explaining the portal's outline, he said the portal will have elaborated information. For example, CWMG. It will contain a "Key Text" identifying each works of Gandhi's each category. Then, there will be compilations, journals, fundamental works and materials related to the topic.

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