Paper trove to go paperless

BINITA PAUL, TT, 04 Dec 2019, Siliguri: The Centre for Himalayan Studies (CHS) at the North Bengal University has decided to digitise several documents from the past to preserve those for research and other works in future.

Some of the documents kept in the libraries of the hills and with the district administration would be preserved, sources said.

The centre -- that functions under the varsity -- undertakes multidisciplinary as well as interdisciplinary socialscientific researches on emergent social, political and economic issues in Bhutan, Sikkim, Darjeeling, Arunachal Pradesh and adjoining areas of Tibet.

In Darjeeling, there is a library called Paras Mani Pradhan library. Sources said some scholars from the CHS are researching on personal collections of Pradhan - an educationist and a social reformer. "We are working on some heritage documents preserved by Paras Mani Pradhan. His personal documents include letters and other contents. We will digitise the documents to preserve them and make those available for people," said Swatahsiddha Sarkar, the head of the department of the CHS.

The department is also working on documents from the British era which are kept in the archives of the Darjeel- ing district administration. "There are documents even of the British period which needs to be preserved. We are working on the documents which are kept at the district magistrate's office," Sarkar added.

At the centre, a Documentation Cell has been opened where cuttings of various stories published on news related to the Himalayas are collected and preserved on a daily basis for many years now. Added to it, the CHS is also documenting the third phase of Gorkhaland Movement that is the period after Subash Ghisingh, the GNLF leader who had spearheaded the movement in the eighties. "We are readying different documents and preparing a narrative which will be published in due course and help research scholars in the future," said a faculty member.