KARACHI, June 30: The Sindh Minister for Information, Shazia Marri, on Monday informed the Sindh Assembly that the records from the office of the Chief Commissioner Sindh pertaining to the period from 1818 to 1935 had been preserved, while record up to 1919 had been manually catalogued.

“These records are provided to researchers on demand”, she said in response to a question posed by opposition member Arif Mustafa Jatoi during the question hour.

Mr Jatoi had inquired about the annual budget for Sindh Archives Wing, the facilities available for the masses to access the historical documents and about the steps taken for the preservation of the same.

Ms Marri informed the house that a fully-fledged reference library coupled with ten personal libraries of notables like Dr N.A. Baloch, Pir Ali Mohammad Rashidi etc containing a number of rare books were available for the masses during office hours.

The minister said that more than 1,000 rare maps of Sindh were available, which were being preserved, while a hand list of 740 maps had so far been published.

She said that computerisation of records was also under way and in-house software had been developed for computerised search of these files.

Besides, she added, other records including 900 manuscripts, civil lists, 40,000 books, microfilms, etc had been preserved.

The minister told the house that a website of Sindh Archives had been designed and uploaded and its editing was under way.

Coming on to the preservation of the records for posterity, Ms Marri said that a preservation laboratory had been working for the preservation of damaged old records.

The minister said that archival records pertaining to the history of the province being acquired from private sources and other record rooms had been duly preserved.

According to her, the process of acquiring records, in original or their copies, from other organisations like jail, police and the municipality had also been started.

The parliamentary leader of the Muttahida Qaumi Movement, Syed Sardar Ahmed, appreciated Mr Jatoi for coming up with such an important question and lauded Ms Marri for her comprehensive response.

He said that valuable records had been lying with various district offices, which should be shifted to Karachi. Besides, there was a lot of record pertaining to Sindh lying at Frere and Liaquat National Libraries and other places like Mumbai, Paris, Berlin, etc, which could be shifted to the archives department, he added.

He pointed out that archaeology was also an important subject and the provincial government should also take keen interest in it.

In response to Syed Sardar Ahmed’s comment, the Sindh Minister for Culture and Archaeology, Sassi Palejo informed the house that only two days back a summary had been sent to the government regarding 130 archaeological sites in Sindh.

Policy for govt advertisements

Replying to another question by Arif Mustafa Jatoi, Ms Marri informed the house that the information department awarded government advertisements to the print media on the basis of ‘circulation-cum-merit’.

She said that the current figures up to June 2008 could not be provided as the month of June was yet to end.

The minister, however, provided details of advertisements space released to newspapers between April, 1 and May 10, 2008.

She said that the criteria for the allocation of Sindh government’s advertisements to various publications was ‘circulation-cum-merit’ as envisaged in the Sindh government’s advertisement policy of 2003, which was duly approved by the Sindh cabinet.

Ms Marri pointed out that the first policy in this regard was devised in the year 2000 and then revised in 2003.

She said that after taking over the charge as the information minister she went through the entire system and found various anomalies in it.

Ms Marri said that she had directed her department to stick to the government policy. She said that advertisements were being awarded following set standards, while regional advertisements were being awarded to regional newspapers as well.

She said that from now on, no discrimination would be made between the newspapers and unlike the past only merit would be taken into consideration. She said that dummy papers would not get any government advertisements.

Replying to another question from Mr Jatoi, the minister gave details of the various newspapers/periodicals published in the province as on March, 31 2008.—APP