LAHORE: Punjab Additional Chief Secretary Shamail Ahmad Khawaja has directed to start the digitalisation project for comprehensive preservation of governmental archives, spread over 400 years of Punjab’s rich history, which have a great cultural and administrative importance. Completion of this project will enable the new entrants in civil service, students and research scholars to get easy access to the legally permissible parts of official documents, for chalking out a better strategy to accelerate the pace of progress in the province.
While talking to the Provincial Secretary Archives and Libraries Punjab Tahir Yousaf, during a briefing session, Shamail Ahmad Khawaja said that the province of Punjab possesses a rich heritage of administrative innovations to promote cultural-goodness as well as fiscal growth. We feel pride in having a rich treasure-trove of archives from the year 1629 to 2005 which include the Mughal dynasty, starting from Emperor Shah Jahan to the last Mughal Emperor Bahadar Shah Zafar, followed by 50 years Ranjeet Singh and subsequently, the period of British rule between 1849 to 1947.
Furthermore, the archives from the day of creation of Pakistan till the year 2005 are also available in original form in the Civil Secretariat, Lahore, he said. There is a dire need to digitalise all these archives so that the legally permissible government documents, the official papers having evidential importance and revenue record spread over the last 400 years could be made accessible to the young bureaucrats and research scholars. This would help seek out precedents which can provide us a basis for better future in the light of our glorious past, he added.