Since September 2017, The Indian Express had published a series of articles that highlighted serious issues, such as lack of proper maintenance of storage vaults (Express photo)
Two months after it was set up to probe issues related to film preservation at the National Film Archive of India (NFAI), a five-member committee headed by veteran filmmaker Shaji N Karun is set to finally start its inquiry this week. The committee, comprising filmmakers, film technology and preservation experts and a retired bureaucrat, is scheduled to arrive in Pune on July 4.
The committee was set up by the Union Information and Broadcasting Ministry (I&B) in the last week of April, following a series of reports in The Indian Express bringing to fore serious shortcomings in the functioning of the NFAI. The panel comprises Piyush Shah, former NFAI director K S Sasidharan, digital content expert Ketan Mehta and former chief of laboratory at Prasad Labs, Hyderabad, Shri Ponnaya.
But due to changes at the top level of the ministry — Smriti Irani was relieved of the I&B Minister’s post and N K Sinha retired from the post of secretary — the committee couldn’t start its work.
The committee has been asked to probe some specific areas — preparing a list of films that have gone missing from NFAI, suggesting ways to salvage the National Film Heritage Mission (NFHM), a Rs 597-crore film preservation and restoration project launched by the Union government, looking into the condition of films and film-related material at NFAI and suggest ways and means to restore them, and carrying out a physical assessment of the condition of storage vaults.
Since September 2017, The Indian Express had published a series of articles that highlighted several serious issues, such as lack of proper maintenance of storage vaults and its detrimental effects on archival film reels, the presence of thousands of reels in gunny bags, lack of fire-fighting capacity with the vaults, among others.
The newspaper had also reported that in 2012, a private firm hired for a cataloguing exercise, had pointed out that 51,000 film reels, which were on accession records of NFAI, were not present in its vaults.